The Running Grave

K’uei/Opposition

Above, fire; below, the lake:

The image of OPPOSITION.

Thus amid all fellowship

The superior man retains his individuality.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

65

The line is yielding and stands between two strong lines; it can be compared to a woman who has lost her veil and is consequently exposed to attack.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

As Strike saw no reason to inform Robin either of Charlotte’s suicide or his detour to St John the Baptist in his next letter, she only knew that he’d been to Cromer to interview the Heatons. Learning that her partner passed within a mile of Chapman Farm on his way to the coast made Robin feel even lonelier. She, too, thought back to the two seaside towns they’d visited together in the course of previous investigations, especially the dinner in Whitstable: the white coral on the mantelpieces set against slate-coloured walls, and the sight of Strike laughing opposite her, framed against a window through which she watched the sea turning indigo in the fading light. Luckily, Robin’s tiredness curtailed a tendency to dwell on or analyse the feelings these memories evoked.

She read his account of his interview with the Heatons three times by torchlight, wanting to be absolutely sure she remembered all of it before tearing it up. Now even more determined to find out as much as she could about Daiyu’s death, Robin resolved to renew her efforts to befriend Emily Pirbright, a task far easier planned than accomplished. Over the next few days, she tried and failed to place herself within Emily’s vicinity until, a week after receiving Strike’s last letter, an unexpected opportunity arose.

Robin was approached at breakfast by the young man with short dreadlocks, who informed her she’d be joining a group going into Norwich that morning to collect money for the church.

‘Tidy yourself up,’ he told her. ‘There’ll be a clean tracksuit on your bed. The minibus leaves in half an hour.’

Robin had become used to casual mention of lengths of time that were impossible to measure for ordinary church members, and had learned it was safest to assume the instruction meant ‘do it as quickly as possible’. In consequence, she gulped down the rest of her porridge rather than trying, as she usually did, to make it last.

When she entered the dormitory she saw fresh tracksuits laid out on their beds, which were no longer scarlet but white. From this, Robin deduced that the church had now moved into the season of the Drowned Prophet. Then she spotted Emily, who was pulling off her red top.

‘Oh, you’re coming too, Emily?’ said Vivienne in surprise, when she entered the dormitory a couple of minutes after Robin. Emily threw Vivienne an unfriendly look as she turned away, tugging on a clean sweatshirt.

Robin deliberately left the dormitory alongside the silent Emily, hoping to sit beside her on the minibus, but they’d gone only a few yards when Robin heard a male voice calling, ‘Rowena!’

Robin turned and her spirits plummeted: Taio had returned to the farm. He, too, was wearing a clean white tracksuit, and appeared to have washed his hair for once.

‘Hello,’ Robin said, trying to look happy to see him, as Emily walked on, head down, arms folded.

‘I chose you to come out with the fundraising group today,’ Taio said, beckoning her to walk with him across the courtyard, ‘because I’ve been thinking about you while I was away, thinking you should be given a few more opportunities to demonstrate a change in thinking. I hear you donated to the church, incidentally. Very generous.’

‘No,’ said Robin, who wasn’t going to fall into the kind of trap the church elders regularly set for the unwary, ‘it wasn’t generous. You were right, I should have done it earlier.’

‘Good girl,’ said Taio, reaching out and massaging the back of her neck, causing gooseflesh to rise on Robin’s back and arms again. ‘On the other matter,’ he said in a lower voice, his hand still resting on her neck, ‘I’m going to wait for you to come to me, and ask for spirit bonding. That will show a real change of attitude, a real abandonment of egomotivity.’

‘OK,’ said Robin, unable to look at him. She saw Emily glance back at the pair of them, her face expressionless.

Boxes of UHC merchandise and collecting boxes bearing the UHC’s heart-shaped logo were already being loaded onto the minibus by Jiang and a couple of other men. When Robin got on the bus she found Emily already sitting beside Amandeep, so chose to sit next to Walter, with Emily directly across the aisle.

It was still very early and the sky overhead had a pearlescent glow. As the minibus drove down the drive and out through the electric gates, Robin felt a surge of elation: she was as excited about seeing the outside world again as she’d have been boarding a plane to a fabulous holiday. Emily’s right leg, she noticed, was jumping nervously up and down.

‘Right,’ said Taio, speaking from the front of the bus, which his brother Jiang was driving. ‘A word for those of you who haven’t yet fundraised for us. Some of you will be manning the stall selling merchandise, and the rest will be using the collecting boxes. Any interest in the church, give them a pamphlet. Today’s take will be divided between our young people’s drop-in centre in Norwich and our climate change awareness programme. We’ve got posters, but be ready to answer questions.

‘Remember, every single contact with a BP is an opportunity to save a soul, so I want to see lots of positivity. All interactions with the public are a chance to show how passionate we are about our mission to change the world.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Walter loudly; he was far thinner than he’d been on joining the church and his skin now had a slightly grey tinge. He seemed neither as confident nor as talkative as he’d been on arrival at Chapman Farm, and his hands had a slight tremor.

Almost an hour after it had left the farm, the minibus passed over the River Wensum and entered the city of Norwich. Robin, who’d only ever seen the city while travelling to Chapman Farm, noticed more flint-covered walls and many church spires on the horizon. The colourful shopfronts, billboards and restaurants brought a double sense of familiarity and strangeness. How odd, to see people in normal clothing going about their business, all in possession of their own money, their own phones, their own door keys.

Now, for the first time, Robin truly appreciated the bravery it must have taken for Kevin Pirbright, who’d lived at the farm since the age of three, to break free and walk out into what must have seemed to him a strange and overwhelming world of which he didn’t know the rules, with hardly any money, no job, and only the tracksuit he was wearing. How had he managed to get himself a rented room, small and shabby though it had been? How challenging had it been to find out how to claim benefits, to get himself a laptop, to set about writing his book? Glancing at Emily, Robin saw the woman transfixed by all she was seeing through the window, and wondered when was the last time Emily had been permitted to set foot outside one of the UHC centres.

Once Jiang had parked the minibus, the merchandise was unloaded and three of the younger men shouldered the heavy components of the stall they were about to set up. The rest, including Robin, carried the boxes of plush turtles, corn dollies, posters and pamphlets. Taio carried nothing, but walked ahead, occasionally exhorting the rest of the struggling group to keep up, the metal poles of the stall clanking in an army kit bag.

Once they’d reached the junction of three pedestrianised streets, which would be a busy thoroughfare once the surrounding shops opened, the experienced younger men set up the stall in surprisingly quick time. Robin helped set out the merchandise and pin glossy posters of UHC projects to the front of the stall.

She’d hoped to be given a collecting box, because that would give her most freedom; she might even be able to slip into a shop and check a newspaper. However, Taio told her to man the stall with Vivienne. He then informed those departing to collect money so that members ‘averaged’ a hundred pounds a day. While he didn’t say so explicitly, Robin could tell that the collectors got the message that they shouldn’t come back without that amount, and she watched in frustration as Emily and Jiang, who’d been put in a pair together, walked out of sight.

Once the surrounding shops had opened, the numbers of people passing the stall increased steadily. Taio hung around for the first hour, watching Robin and Vivienne interact with customers and critiquing them between sales. The cuddly turtles, which were popular with children, were the biggest draw. Taio told Robin and Vivienne that if people decided not to buy a turtle or a corn dolly, they should still be offered the collecting box for a donation to the church’s projects, a strategy that was surprisingly effective: most of those they asked donated a few coins or even a note to escape the awkwardness of not having bought anything.

At last, to Robin’s relief, Taio left to check how those with collecting boxes were getting on. As soon as he was out of earshot, Vivienne turned to Robin and said, in her usual would-be working-class voice that lapsed when she forgot herself,

‘I can’t believe ’e let Emily come.’

‘Why?’ asked Robin.

‘Don’t you know abou’ what happened in Birmingham?’

‘No, what?’

Vivienne glanced around, then said in a lower voice,

‘She got into a CR with a guy up there.’

This, Robin knew, meant a relationship anybody outside the church would consider unexceptional: a monogamous partnership beginning in mutual sexual attraction, which the UHC considered an unhealthy extension of the possession instinct.

‘Oh, wow,’ said Robin. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yeah, but that’s not all,’ said Vivienne. ‘She told the guy a ton of lies that made ’im question his faith, and he ended up talking to a church elder about it, which is why she got relocated to Chapman Farm.’

‘Wow,’ said Robin again. ‘What kind of lies?’

Again, Vivienne glanced around before speaking.

‘OK, don’t spread this around, but you know ’ow she and Becca knew the Drowned Prophet?’

‘Yes, I’ve heard that,’ said Robin.

‘Well, it was stuff about Daiyu, apparently. Just utter shit.’

‘What did she tell him?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Vivienne, ‘but it was so bad, this guy nearly left the church.’

‘How d’you know all this?’ asked Robin, careful to sound admiring of Vivienne’s superior knowledge.

‘I got talking to one of the other girls who got relocated. She told me Emily and this guy were, like, sneaking off together and refusing spirit bonding with anyone else. It was pure materialism. The girl thinks Emily was actually trying to make him go DV with her.’

‘That’s terrible,’ said Robin.

‘I know,’ said Vivienne. ‘Apparently, they had to drag her onto the minibus. She was shouting “I love you” at the guy.’ Vivienne’s expression was disgusted. ‘Can you imagine? But thank God he just walked away.’

‘Yeah,’ said Robin. ‘Thank God.’

Vivienne turned away to serve a mother whose small child had dragged her over to look at the plush turtles. When they’d departed, the little boy clutching his new turtle, Vivienne turned back to Robin.

‘You know Papa J’s been in LA?’ Her voice softened as she said ‘Papa J’; clearly, Robin’s companion was now as thoroughly smitten with the church’s founder as most of the women at Chapman Farm, and indeed some of the men. ‘Well, he’s coming back next week.’

‘Really?’ said Robin.

‘Yeah. He always comes back for the Manifestation of the Drowned Prophet… Have you spirit bonded with him?’

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘Have you?’

‘No,’ sighed Vivienne, her longing quite evident.

Taio came back several times over the next couple of hours to check how much money was in the strongbox underneath the table. On one of these occasions, he arrived chewing, and brushed flakes of what looked like pastry from around his mouth. He neither suggested that the other two eat anything, nor brought them any food.

Hours passed, and Robin started to feel light-headed by what she knew, from the position of the sun, must be mid-afternoon. Inured though she was to hunger and tiredness at the farm, it was a new challenge to stand on one spot for so long, having to smile, make cheerful conversation and proselytise for the church while the sun beat down on you, and without even the usual meal of sloppy noodles and overcooked vegetables to sustain her.

‘Robin!’

‘Yes?’

She turned automatically towards the person who’d spoken her name, and one second of icy horror later, realised what she’d done. A little boy who was holding a plush, red-breasted bird in one hand, and introducing it to the turtle his father had just bought him. Vivienne was looking at Robin strangely.

‘It’s my nickname,’ Robin told Vivienne, forcing a laugh, as the father and son walked away. ‘It’s what my sis—I mean, one of my flesh objects calls me, sometimes.’

‘Oh,’ said Vivienne. ‘Why’s she call you Robin?’

‘She had a book about Robin Hood,’ Robin invented wildly. ‘It was her favourite, before I was born. She wanted my parents to call me Rob—’

She broke off. Taio was running down the street towards them, red-faced and sweaty: heads turned as he galumphed past shoppers in his white tracksuit, his face both angry and panicked.

‘Problem,’ he panted, on arriving at the stall. ‘Emily’s gone.’

‘What?’ gasped Vivienne.

‘Fucking Jiang,’ said Taio. ‘Give me the strongbox and pack up the merchandise. We’ve got to find her.’

66

DECREASE combined with sincerity…

It furthers one to undertake something.

How is this to be carried out?

One may use two small bowls for the sacrifice.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

When Taio had run off clutching the strongbox, Robin and Vivienne stripped the stall, leaving the metal frame standing.

‘Just leave all that,’ said Vivienne in panic, as Robin stuffed the last of the turtles and corn dollies back into their boxes. ‘Oh my God. What if she’s gone DV?’

The collecting box rattled in Robin’s hands as she and Vivienne set off at a jog up Castle Street. Robin wondered at Vivienne’s total, unquestioning acceptance of the fact that a grown woman choosing to break away from the group was dangerous. Did nothing about Vivienne’s own panic make her ask why such strict control was necessary? Apparently not: Vivienne was darting into every shop they passed, as alarmed as a mother might be on finding out her toddler had gone missing. In their matching white tracksuits, with the noisy collecting box clutched to Robin’s chest, the pair drew more startled looks from passers-by.

‘Is that her?’ gasped Vivienne.

Robin saw the flash of white Vivienne had spotted, but it turned out to be a shaven-headed youth in an England football strip.

‘Wait,’ panted Robin, jogging to a halt. ‘Vivienne, wait! We should split up, we’ll cover more ground. You check down there –’ Robin pointed at Davey Place ‘– and I’ll keep going this way. We’ll meet back at the stall if we haven’t found her in an hour, OK?’

‘How will we know—?’

‘Just ask someone the time!’

‘All right,’ said Vivienne, although she looked scared at being left on her own, ‘I suppose that makes sense.’

Fearing that Vivienne might change her mind if given time to think about it, Robin set off at a run again and, glancing over her shoulder, was relieved to see Vivienne disappear into Davey Place.

Robin immediately turned left up a side road, emerging onto a wide street, which ran past a huge grassy mound on top of which stood Norwich Castle, an enormous and imposing crenellated cube of stone.

Robin leaned back against the wall of a shop to catch her breath. Aftershocks at having been so foolish as to respond to her real name were still ricocheting through her. Had her explanation been good enough? Might Vivienne forget the lapse, in the shock of hearing that Emily had disappeared? Looking up at the imposing façade of the castle, she heard Strike’s voice in her head:

You’re compromised. You’ve put your real identity within grasping distance of anyone who gets suspicious of you. Get out now. One more mistake and you’re toast.

And that, Robin thought guiltily, was without Strike knowing that Lin had caught her with the torch in the woods. She could just imagine what he’d say to that, too.

Just because she hasn’t talked yet doesn’t mean she won’t. All it needs is a few people to share their suspicions.

Robin imagined going to a telephone box now, just as Niamh Doherty’s father had done so many years ago, and making a reverse charge call to the office to tell Pat she needed to come out. The thought of hearing Pat’s gruff voice, of knowing she’d never have to return to Chapman Farm, of being safe forever against the threat of Taio and spirit bonding, was incredibly tempting.

But against all of that was the job still undone. She’d discovered nothing sufficiently damaging about the church to force a meeting between Will Edensor and his family. While she had a few titbits that might be compromising, such as Giles Harmon’s liaison with the possibly underage Lin, Robin doubted her word would stand up against the might of the UHC’s lawyers, especially as Lin, born and raised in the UHC, was highly unlikely to give evidence against a Principal of the church.

I’ve got to stay, she told the Strike in her head, and I know you would, too, if you were me.

Robin closed her eyes for a moment or two, exhausted and hungry, and among the disconnected thoughts sliding through her mind was, and there’s Ryan.

Ryan, whom she thought about far less than Strike these days… but that, surely, was because she was so focused on the job… it was natural, inevitable…

Robin took a deep breath and set off again, scanning the street for Emily, though she was certain the woman was long gone. She might have hitched a lift, or made a reverse charge call of her own to some relative who might be able to come and collect her. With luck, though, the agency would be able to trace Emily on the outside…

‘What?’ Robin exclaimed, coming to an abrupt halt, her eyes on a folded copy of The Times in a rack at the entrance to a newsagents. Evidently, Britain had voted to leave the EU.

She’d just lifted the paper out of the rack to read the story, when she saw a white-clad figure in the distance. Jiang was approaching from the opposite direction, his expression furious. Robin stuffed the paper hastily back into its slot, wheeled around and hurried back the way she’d come: she didn’t think Jiang had spotted her, and had no desire to meet him. Having hurried down a narrow, pedestrianised side street, she entered a covered arcade she hadn’t previously seen. Glancing behind her, she saw Jiang pass in front of the castle and disappear from view.

The arcade in which Robin now stood was old and rather beautiful, with a high vaulted glass ceiling, Art Nouveau tiles above the shopfronts and pendant lights like giant harebells. Desperate for further tidings of the outside world, Robin walked on, looking for a newsagents until, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a patch of white.

Through a gap between the colourful puppets displayed in a toy shop’s window she saw the bald Emily gazing blankly at shelves of toys as though hypnotised, her collecting box cradled to her chest.

After one astonished moment, Robin doubled back to enter the shop. Moving quietly in her trainers, she rounded the end of a row of shelves.

‘Emily?’

Emily jumped and stared at Robin as though she’d never seen her before.

‘Um… people are looking for you. Are you… what are you doing?’

The resentment bordering on occasional anger that Emily displayed at Chapman Farm had gone. She was chalk white and shaking.

‘It’s OK,’ said Robin, speaking as she might have spoken to somebody disorientated who’d just suffered a physical accident.

‘Is Taio angry?’ Emily whispered.

‘He’s worried,’ said Robin, not entirely untruthfully.

If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought Emily had taken some kind of stimulant. Her pupils were dilated and a muscle in her cheek was flickering.

‘I did that thing to him – you know – in the Retreat Room – that thing where you suck their—?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin, very aware of children’s voices on the other side of the shelves.

‘—so he’d let me come to Norwich.’

‘Right,’ said Robin. Various courses of action were running through her mind. She could call Strike and see whether he’d pick Emily up, advise Emily to call a relative, if she had any outside the church, or tell Emily to turn herself in to the police, but all of these options would necessarily reveal Robin’s lack of allegiance to the UHC, and if Emily refused, Robin would have placed her own security in the hands of the woman now quivering uncontrollably in front of the shelves of Sylvanian Families.

‘Why did you want to come to Norwich so much?’ Robin asked quietly, certain of the answer, but wanting to hear Emily say it.

‘I was going to… but I can’t. I’ll only kill myself. That’s why they warn us. You can’t survive out here, once you reach step eight. I suppose I must be nearer pure spirit than I thought,’ said Emily, with an attempt at a laugh.

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Robin, moving closer to Emily. ‘About step eight.’

‘I am master of my soul,’ said Emily, and Robin recognised the mantra of the Stolen Prophet. ‘Once your spirit’s really evolved, you can’t take rejoining the materialist world. It’ll kill you.’

Emily’s gaze shifted back to the shelves of Sylvanian Families: little model animals dressed as humans, packaged as parents and babies, with their houses and furniture ranged beside them.

‘Look,’ she said to Robin, pointing at the animals. ‘It’s all materialist possession. Tiny little flesh objects and their houses… all in boxes… I’ll have to go in the box, now,’ said Emily, with another laugh that turned into a sob.

‘What box?’

‘It’s for when you’ve been bad,’ whispered Emily. ‘Really bad…’

Robin’s mind was working rapidly.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We’ll tell them you needed the bathroom, but you came over faint, OK? You nearly passed out, and a woman came to help you and wouldn’t let you leave until you got your colour back. I’ll back you up – I’ll say when I came into the bathroom, the woman was threatening to get an ambulance. If we both tell the same story, you won’t be punished, OK? I’ll back you up,’ she repeated. ‘It’ll be all right.’

‘Why would you help me?’ asked Emily incredulously.

‘Because I want to.’

Emily held up her collecting box pathetically.

‘I didn’t get enough.’

‘I can help with that. I’ll bump you up a bit. Wait there.’

Robin had no qualms about leaving Emily, because she could tell the latter was too paralysed with fear to move. The girl at the cash register, who was chatting to a young man, handed over a pair of scissors from behind the desk almost absent-mindedly. Robin rejoined Emily and used the point of the scissors to prise open the collecting box.

‘I’ll have to keep something, because Vivienne saw money going in,’ said Robin, emptying out most of the cash inside and shoving it into Emily’s box instead. ‘There you go.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ Emily whispered, watching Robin stuff the last five pound note through the slot.

‘I told you, I want to. Stay there, I’ve got to give the scissors back.’

She found Emily standing exactly where she’d left her when she returned.

‘OK, shall we—?’

‘My brother killed himself and it was all our fault,’ said Emily jerkily. ‘Mine and Becca’s.’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’

‘I can. It was us, we did it to him. He shot himself. You can get guns really easily in the materialist world,’ said Emily with a nervous glance at the shoppers passing the toy shop window, as though she feared they might be armed.

‘It might’ve been an accident,’ said Robin.

‘No, it wasn’t, it definitely wasn’t. Becca made me sign a thing… she told me I’d suppressed what he did to us. She’s always done that,’ said Emily, her breathing rapid and shallow, ‘told me what happened, and what didn’t happen.’

Despite her genuine concern for Emily and the urgent need to get back to the group, this was an opening Robin couldn’t ignore.

‘What does Becca say didn’t happen?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ said Emily, shifting her gaze back on to the rows of happily paired animals smiling out of their neat cellophane-wrapped boxes. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing at a family of four pigs. ‘Pig demons… that’s a sign,’ she said, breathing rapidly.

‘A sign of what?’ said Robin.

‘That I need to shut up.’

‘Emily, they’re just toys,’ said Robin. ‘They aren’t supernatural, they’re not signs. You can tell me anything, I won’t give you away.’

‘The last person who said that to me was in Birmingham and he didn’t – he didn’t mean it – he—’

Emily began to cry. She shook her head as Robin laid a consoling hand on her arm.

‘Don’t, don’t – you’ll be in trouble, being nice to me – you shouldn’t be helping me, Becca will make sure you’re punished for it—’

‘I’m not scared of Becca,’ said Robin.

‘Well, you should be,’ said Emily, drawing deep breaths in an effort to control herself. ‘She’ll… do anything to protect the mission. Anything. I… I should know.’

‘How could you threaten the mission?’ asked Robin.

‘Because,’ said Emily, staring at a pair of small pandas in pink and blue nappies, ‘I know things… Becca says I was too young to remember…’ Then, in a rush of words, Emily said, ‘But I wasn’t really small, I was nine, and I know, because they moved me out of the kids’ dormitory after it happened.’

‘After what happened?’ said Robin.

‘After Daiyu became “invisible”,’ said Emily, her tone putting quotation marks around the word. ‘I knew Becca was lying, even then, only I went along with it, because,’ fresh tears gushed forth, ‘I loved… loved…’

‘You loved Becca?’

‘No… not… it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter… I shouldn’t be… talking about any of this… forget it, please…’

‘I will,’ lied Robin.

‘It’s just Becca,’ said Emily, struggling to regain control of herself again, wiping her face, ‘telling me I’m lying all the time… she’s not… since she went away… I feel like she’s not who she was before…’

‘When did she go away?’ asked Robin.

‘Ages ago… they sent her to Birmingham… they split up flesh objects… they must have thought we were too close… and when she came back… she wasn’t… she was really one of them, she wouldn’t hear a word against any of them, even Mazu… Sometimes,’ said Emily, ‘I want to scream the truth, but… that’s egomotivity…’

‘It isn’t egomotivity to tell the truth,’ said Robin.

‘You shouldn’t talk like that,’ said Emily, on a hiccup. ‘That’s how I got relocated.’

‘I joined the church to find truth,’ said Robin. ‘If it’s just another place where you can’t tell it, I don’t want to stay.’

‘“A single event, a thousand different recollections. Only the Blessed Divinity knows the truth,”’ said Emily, quoting from The Answer.

‘But there is truth,’ said Robin firmly. ‘It’s not all opinions or memories. There is truth.’

Emily looked at Robin with what seemed to be frightened fascination.

‘D’you believe in her?’

‘In who? Becca?’

‘No. In the Drowned Prophet.’

‘I… yes, I suppose so.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t,’ whispered Emily. ‘She wasn’t what they say she was.’

‘What d’you mean?’

Emily glanced through the window of the toy shop, then said,

‘She was always up to secret stuff at the farm. Forbidden things.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘Stuff in the barn and the woods. Becca saw it, too. She says I’m making it up, but she knows what happened. I know she remembers,’ said Emily desperately.

‘What did you see Daiyu doing in the barn and the woods?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ said Emily. ‘But I know she didn’t die. I know that.’

‘What?’ said Robin blankly.

‘She’s not dead. She’s out there, somewhere, grown up. She never drow—’

Emily gave a little gasp. Robin turned: a woman in a white top and trousers had come around the corner of the shelves, holding the hands of two boisterous little boys, and Robin knew Emily had momentarily mistaken the mother for another UHC member. The two little boys began clamouring for Thomas the Tank Engine models.

‘I want Percy. There’s Percy! I want Percy!’

‘You’ll really say I felt faint?’ Emily whispered to Robin. ‘In the bathroom, and all that?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Robin, afraid to push Emily further right now, but hopeful that she’d now established a rapport that would survive, back at the farm. ‘Are you OK to go now?’

Emily nodded, still sniffing, and followed Robin out of the shop. They’d walked just a few steps along the arcade when Emily grabbed Robin by the arm.

‘Taio wants you to spirit bond with him, doesn’t he?’

Robin nodded.

‘Well, if you don’t want to,’ said Emily in a low voice, ‘you need to go with Papa J when he comes back. None of the other men are allowed to touch Papa J’s spirit wives. Becca’s a spirit wife, that’s why she never has to go in the Retreat Rooms with anyone else.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Robin.

‘Just go with Papa J,’ said Emily, ‘and you’ll be OK.’

‘Thanks, Emily,’ said Robin, who valued the helpful intention behind the words, if not the advice itself. ‘Come on, we’d better hurry.’

67

It is not I who seek the young fool;

The young fool seeks me.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Strike took Robin’s next letter with him to reread while on overnight surveillance on the Franks on Monday evening, because he found much in there to interest him.

Wan, Robin wrote, had been moved on from Chapman Farm, though Robin didn’t know where she’d gone. She’d left her baby behind with Mazu, who’d named the little girl Yixin, and was now carrying her around and speaking as though she were the biological mother. Robin also described her trip into Norwich, but as she’d omitted to mention her accidental response to her own real name, Strike was unencumbered by fresh worries about Robin’s safety as he pondered Emily’s assertion that Daiyu hadn’t really drowned.

Even without supporting evidence, Emily’s opinion interested the detective, because it took him back to his musings on the esplanade in Cromer, when he’d mulled over the possibility that Daiyu had been carried down onto the beach, not to die, but to be handed to someone else. Sitting in his dark car, casting regular glances up at the windows of the Franks’ flat which, atypically at this hour, were lit up, he asked himself how likely it was that Daiyu had survived the trip to the beach, without reaching any conclusions.

The Waces had had a clear motive for Daiyu’s disappearance: to prevent the Graves family from obtaining DNA evidence and regaining control of that quarter of a million pounds in blue chip shares. Death hadn’t been necessary to achieve that objective: merely putting Daiyu beyond the Graves’ reach would have done it. But if Daiyu hadn’t died, where was she? Were there relatives of either Mazu or Jonathan he didn’t know about, who might have agreed to take the girl in?

Daiyu would be twenty-eight if she were still alive. Would she be content to remain silent, knowing that a cult had grown up around her supposedly drowned seven-year-old self?

In the penultimate line of her letter, Robin answered the question Strike had posed in his last: did she have any reason to believe her cover might have been blown at Chapman Farm, given that an unknown woman had approached Strike, apparently to disrupt his surveillance?

I don’t know whether that woman you mentioned has got anything to do with the church but I don’t think anyone here knows or suspects who I really am.

Movement at the door of the Franks’ block made Strike look up. The two brothers were walking, bow-legged, towards their dilapidated van, laden with heavy boxes and what looked like bags of groceries. As the younger Frank reached the vehicle he stumbled and several large bottles of mineral water tipped out of a box and rolled away. Strike, who by this time was filming them, watched as the older brother berated the younger, setting down his own box to help chase down the bottles. Strike zoomed in, and saw what looked like a coil of rope protruding from the older brother’s box.

Strike gave the van a head start, then followed them. After a short drive, they came to a halt outside a large lock-up facility in Croydon. Here, the detective watched as they unloaded the boxes and groceries and disappeared into the building.

It wasn’t, of course, a crime to buy rope or a van, or to hire a storage unit and put food and water in there, but Strike considered this activity highly ominous. Try as he might, he could think of no plausible explanation for these activities other than that the brothers were indeed planning the abduction and imprisonment of the actress whom they seemed determined to punish for being insufficiently accommodating of their demands for her attention. As far as he knew, the police hadn’t yet paid a call on the Franks to warn them off. He couldn’t help suspecting that the matter was being deprioritised because Mayo could afford a private detective agency to keep a watch on her stalkers.

He sat watching the entrance to the facility for twenty minutes, but the brothers didn’t emerge. After a while, knowing he’d hear the van starting up again, he did something he’d so far resisted doing, and Googled ‘Charlotte Campbell funeral’ on his phone.

Since the newspaper-reading public had learned of Charlotte’s death, further details of her suicide had leaked into the papers. Thus Strike knew that Charlotte had taken a cocktail of drink and anti-depressants before slitting her wrists and bleeding out in a bath. The cleaner had found the bathroom door locked at nine o’clock in the morning and, having pounded on it and shouted to no avail, called the police, who’d broken into the room. Much as he’d have preferred it not to, Strike’s imagination insisted on showing him a vivid picture of Charlotte submerged in her own blood, her black hair floating on the clotted surface.

He’d wondered where the family would choose as Charlotte’s final resting place. Her late father’s family had been Scottish, whereas her mother, Tara, had been born and lived in London. When Strike learned from The Times that Charlotte would be buried in Brompton Cemetery, one of the smartest in the capital, he knew Tara must have been given the casting vote. The choice of Brompton also ensured publicity, for which Tara had always had a weakness. Thus Strike was able to scan through photographs of the mourners on the Daily Mail website as he sat in the dark.

Many of the black-clad people who’d left Charlotte’s funeral earlier that day were familiar to him: Viscount Jago Ross, Charlotte’s ex-husband, looking as ever like a dissolute arctic fox; her floppy-haired stepbrother, Valentine Longcaster; Sacha Legard, her handsome half-brother, who was an actor; Madeline Courson-Miles, the jewellery designer Strike had previously dated; Izzy Chiswell, one of Charlotte’s old schoolfriends; Ciara Porter, a model with whom Strike had once had a one-night stand; and even Henry Worthington-Fields, the skinny red-headed man who’d worked at Charlotte’s favourite antiques shop. Unsurprisingly, Landon Dormer was conspicuous by his absence.

Strike hadn’t received an invitation to the funeral, not that this bothered him: as far as he was concerned, he’d said his farewells in the small Norfolk church overlooking Chapman Farm. In any case, given his personal history with some of the people who’d have been his fellow mourners, the funeral would undoubtedly have been one of the most uncomfortable occasions of his life.

The last photograph in the Mail article featured Tara. From what Strike could see through the thick black veil on her hat, her once-beautiful features had been severely distorted by what looked like overuse of cosmetic fillers. She was flanked on one side by her fourth husband and on the other by Charlotte’s only full sibling, Amelia, who was two years older than his ex-fiancée. This was the sister who’d called Strike’s office on the morning after Charlotte’s suicide had been announced to the press and who, on learning from Pat that Strike was unavailable, had simply hung up. Amelia had made no contact with Strike since, nor had he tried to contact her. If the rumour that Charlotte had left a suicide note was true, he was happy to remain in ignorance of what it said.

The noise of a slamming car door made him look up. The Frank brothers had emerged from the facility and were now attempting to make their cold van start. On the fourth attempt, it sputtered into life, and Strike tailed them back to their block of flats. The lights in their flat went out after twenty more minutes and Strike turned back to the news on his phone, to kill time until Shah arrived to take over from him at eight.

The Brexit referendum might be over, but the subject continued to dominate the headlines. Strike scrolled down past these articles without opening them, vaping, until, with misgivings, he saw another familiar face: that of Bijou Watkins.

The picture, which had been taken as she left her flat, showed Bijou wearing a tight peacock blue dress that emphasised her figure. Her dark hair was freshly styled, she was expertly made up as usual and carried a glossy briefcase in her hand. Beside Bijou’s picture was another, of a stout, bare-faced and frizzy-haired woman in an unflattering evening dress of pink satin, who was named as Lady Matilda Honbold in the caption. Above the two photos was the headline: Andrew ‘Honey Badger’ Honbold to Divorce.

Strike skim-read the article below, and in paragraph four found what he’d feared: his own name.

A committed Catholic, high-profile donor to the Conservative party and patron of both The Campaign for Ethical Journalism and Catholic Aid to Africa, Honbold’s alleged infidelity was first reported in Private Eye. The magazine alleged that Honbold’s unnamed mistress had also enjoyed a dalliance with well-known private detective Cormoran Strike, stories that were denied by Honbold, Watkins and Strike, with Honbold threatening legal action against the magazine.

‘Shit,’ muttered Strike.

He’d thought the rumour of his involvement with Bijou had been successfully quashed. The last thing he needed was a signpost in The Times telling Patterson and Littlejohn exactly where to mine for dirt.

Promptly at eight o’clock, Shah arrived to take over surveillance on the Franks.

‘Morning,’ he said, getting into the passenger seat of the BMW. Before Strike could tell him what had happened overnight, Shah held out his own phone and said,

‘This your woman from the Connaught? I got a few.’

Strike swiped through the pictures. All showed different angles of the same dark woman, who was wearing a beanie hat and baggy jeans, and standing on the corner of Denmark Street nearest the office.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘looks like her. When did you take these?’

‘Yesterday evening. She was there when I came out of the office.’

‘Was she working for Patterson Inc when you were there?’

‘Definitely not. She’d have stuck in my mind.’

‘OK, do me a favour and forward these to Midge and Barclay.’

‘What d’you reckon she’s after?’

‘If she’s another Patterson operative, she could be checking out what clients we’ve got, to try and scare them off. Or she might be trying to identify people working for the agency, to see if she can get anything on them.’

‘I’ll hold off on starting that heroin habit, then.’

By the time Strike had briefed Shah, then driven back into central London, he was both tired and irritable, and his mood wasn’t improved when, waiting at some traffic lights, he spotted a gigantic poster he’d ordinarily have overlooked. It showed Jonathan Wace against a deep blue, star-flecked background, dressed in white robes, his arms outstretched, a smile on the handsome face that was tilted heavenwards. The legend read: ‘SUPERSERVICE 2016! Interested in the Universal Humanitarian Church? Meet PAPA J at Olympia on Friday 12th August, 2016!’

‘Charlotte Ross’s sister’s called again,’ were Pat’s first, unwelcome words when an unshaven Strike appeared at half past nine, clutching a bacon roll he’d purchased on his way to the office: diet be damned.

‘Yeah? Any message?’ asked Strike.

‘She said she’s going to the country for a month, but she’d like to meet you when she gets back.’

‘Is she expecting an answer?’ asked Strike.

‘No, that’s all she said.’

Strike grunted and headed for the kettle.

‘And you’ve had a call from a Jacob Messenger.’

‘What?’ said Strike, surprised.

‘He says his half-brother told him you were after him. Says you can call him any time this morning.’

‘Do me a favour,’ said Strike, stirring sweetener into his coffee, ‘and ring him back and ask him if he’s happy to FaceTime. I want to make sure it’s really him.’

Strike headed into the inner office, still thinking about the beautiful woman who was apparently keeping the office under surveillance. If he could only clear up the Patterson mess his life would be considerably less complicated, not to mention less expensive.

‘He’s fine to FaceTime,’ Pat announced five minutes later, entering Strike’s office carrying a Post-it note with Messenger’s number on it. Once she’d gone, Strike opened FaceTime on his computer and tapped in Jacob Messenger’s number.

The call was answered almost immediately by the same very tanned young man who beamed out of the picture on Strike’s noticeboard. With his white-toothed smile, slicked dark hair and overplucked eyebrows, he looked excited to be speaking to Strike, whereas the detective’s primary emotion was frustration. Whoever was critically ill or dying at Chapman Farm, it clearly wasn’t Jacob Messenger.

A couple of minutes later, Strike had learned that Messenger’s interest in the church had been ignited when his agent received a request for Jacob to attend one of the UHC’s charity projects, continued through a photoshoot in which Jacob had worn a UHC sweatshirt, lingered through a short press interview in which he spoke of his new interest in spirituality and charity work, only to wither away when invited on a week-long retreat at a farm, with no media presence.

‘I wan’t gonna go to no bloody farm,’ said Jacob, blindingly white teeth fully on display as he laughed. ‘What would I wanna do that for?’

‘Right,’ said Strike. ‘Well, this has been very—’

‘Listen, though,’ said Jacob, ‘’ave you ever fort of doing a show?’

‘Have I what?’

‘Like, fly on the wall, follow you investigating stuff. I looked you up. Seriously, I reckon my agent would be interested. I was finking, if you and me teamed up, and you could be, like, showing me the ropes and stuff, wiv a camera crew—’

‘I don’t—’

‘Could be good publicity for ya,’ said Messenger, while a blonde in a mini-dress drifted across the screen behind him, looking vague. ‘It’d raise your profile. I in’t boasting or nuffing but I’d def’nitely get us an audience—’

‘Yeah, that wouldn’t work,’ said Strike firmly. ‘Goodbye.’

He hung up while Messenger was still talking.

‘Stupid tit,’ Strike muttered, getting to his feet again to tug Messenger’s picture off the UHC noticeboard, rip it in half and put it in the bin. He then scribbled ‘WHO’S JACOB?’ on a piece of paper and pinned it where Messenger’s photo had been.

Taking a few steps backwards, Strike contemplated yet again the various photos of the dead, untraced and unknown people connected to the church. Other than the note about Jacob, the only other recent change to the board was another piece of paper, which he’d pinned up after his trip to Cromer. It read ‘JOGGER ON BEACH?’ and it, too, was in the ‘still to be found/identified’ column.

Frowning, Strike looked from picture to picture, coming to rest on that of Jennifer Wace, with her big hair and her frosted lipstick, frozen forever in the 1980s. Since his trip to Cromer, Strike had tried to find out all he could about the ways in which somebody might induce a seizure in an epileptic and as far as he could see, the only plausible possibility would be withdrawing medication or, perhaps, substituting genuine medication with some ineffective substance. But supposing Wace had indeed tampered with his first wife’s pills, how could he have known a seizure would occur at that specific moment, while Jennifer was in the water? As a murder method it was ludicrously chancy, though admittedly no less risky than taking a child swimming, and hoping the sea would hide her body forever.

Stroking his unshaven chin, the detective wondered whether he wasn’t becoming fixated on what might turn out to be a dead end. Maybe he was joining the ranks of conspiracy theorists, who saw hidden plots and stratagems where other, saner folk said, like Shelley Heaton, ‘That’s a funny coincidence,’ and moved on with their lives? Was it arrogant, he asked himself, to think he’d manage to trace a connection where nobody else had succeeded in doing so? Possibly – but then, he’d been called arrogant before, most often by the woman who now lay freshly interred in Brompton Cemetery, and it had never yet deterred him from doing precisely what he’d set out to do.

68

Nine in the second place means:

The abyss is dangerous.

One should strive to attain small things only.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

A strange mood seemed to have infected Chapman Farm ever since members’ tracksuits had changed to white. There was a jitteriness in the air, a sense of strain. Robin noticed an increased tendency on the part of church members to be even more performatively considerate in their treatment of each other, as though some hidden entity were constantly watching and judging.

This generalised anxiety heightened Robin’s own. While she hadn’t precisely lied in her last letter to Strike, she hadn’t told the whole truth, either.

When she and Emily had returned to the abandoned stall in Norwich and told their story of Emily coming over faint in a bathroom, Taio had seemed to accept their account at face value. Relieved as he was to get Emily back, most of his ire was directed at Jiang for losing sight of her and putting her at the mercy of the bubble people, and he spent much of the journey back to Chapman Farm muttering what looked like insults and imprecations at the back of his brother’s head. Jiang didn’t respond, but remained hunched and silent over the steering wheel.

However, over the next couple of days Robin had detected a shift in Taio’s attitude. Doubtless the large amount of money Emily was supposed to have collected on her own, coupled with the very small amount left in the collecting box from the stall, had raised his suspicions. Several times, Robin caught Taio staring at her in no friendly manner, and she also noticed sidelong glances from others who’d been in Norwich. When Robin saw Amandeep hastily hushing Vivienne and Walter as she approached them in the courtyard, she knew she’d been the subject under discussion. Robin wondered whether Vivienne had told anyone about her answering to her real name and if so, how far the information had spread.

Robin knew she’d reached the absolute limit of allowable mistakes, and as she wasn’t prepared to have sex with either Taio or Jonathan Wace, she was now on borrowed time at Chapman Farm. Exactly how she was going to leave, she wasn’t yet sure. It would take a certain amount of courage to tell Taio and Mazu she wanted to go, and perhaps it would be easier to struggle over the barbed wire at the perimeter by night. However, her immediate concern, given that her time was now definitely running out, was to identify priorities and achieve them as quickly as possible.

Firstly, she wanted to capitalise on the secret understanding she’d brokered with Emily to get as much information out of her as possible. Secondly, she was determined to try and engineer a one-on-one conversation with Will Edensor, so as to be able to give Sir Colin up-to-date information on his son. Lastly, she thought she might try and find the hatchet hidden in a tree in the woods.

She knew that even this limited agenda would be tricky. Whether deliberately or not (and Robin suspected the former), ever since they’d returned to Norwich she and Emily had been given tasks that kept them as far apart as possible. She noticed that Emily was always flanked by the same people in the dining hall, as though an order had been given to keep her under watch at all times. Emily had twice made an attempt to sit beside Robin in the dining hall, before being blocked by one of the people who seemed to be constantly shadowing her. Robin and Emily’s eyes had also met several times in the dormitory and on one of these occasions, Emily had offered a fleeting smile before turning quickly away as Becca entered.

Catching Will Edensor alone was also difficult, because Robin’s contact with him had always been negligible, and since their joint stint on the vegetable patch she’d rarely been assigned a task with him. His status at Chapman Farm remained that of manual labourer, in spite of his clear intelligence and his trust fund, and such joint work as they did together was always supervised and therefore afforded no opportunities for conversation.

As for the hatchet supposedly hidden in the woods, she knew it would be unwise to use the torch to look for it by night, in case the beam was spotted by someone looking out of the dormitory windows. Unfortunately, searching the woods by daylight would be almost as difficult. Other than its use as an occasional adventure playground for children, the patch of uncultivated land was barely used, and barring Will and Lin, who’d been there illicitly, and the young man who’d searched it on the night Bo had gone missing, Robin had never seen an adult enter it. How she was to slip away from her tasks, or justify her presence in the woods if found there, she currently had no idea.

Since her excursion to Norwich, Robin seemed to have been given a new hybrid status: part manual worker, part high-level recruit. She wasn’t invited back into the city to fundraise, although she continued to study church doctrine with her group. Robin had a feeling her thousand pound donation had made her too valuable to relegate entirely to the status of a skivvy, but that she was on a kind of unspoken probation. Vivienne, who was always a good barometer of who was in favour and who wasn’t, was pointedly ignoring her.

Robin’s next letter to Strike was short and, as she was well aware, disappointingly short of information, but the morning after she’d deposited it in the plastic rock, a significant event happened at Chapman Farm: the return of Jonathan Wace.

Everyone turned out to watch Papa J’s silver Mercedes come up the drive with a convoy of lesser cars behind it, and before the procession had even drawn to a halt, all members began to cheer and applaud, Robin included. When Wace stepped out of the car, the crowd became almost hysterical.

He looked tanned, rested and as handsome as ever. His eyes grew wet again as he looked around at the cheering throng, pressing his hand over his heart and making one of his self-deprecating little bows. When he walked to Mazu, who was holding baby Yixin in her arms, he embraced her and delightedly examined the baby, as though it was his own – which, Robin suddenly realised, she might well be. The screams of the crowd became deafening, and Robin made sure to clap so enthusiastically her hands hurt.

From the car behind Wace’s, five young people emerged, all of them strangers, and Robin thought, mainly because of their perfect teeth, they were American. Two preppy young men and three noticeably beautiful young women, all dressed in white UHC tracksuits, stood beaming at the British church members, and Robin guessed that they’d been brought over to Chapman Farm from the San Francisco centre. She watched as Jonathan introduced them one by one to Mazu, who received them graciously.

That evening, there was another feast in the dining hall, which had once again been decorated with scarlet and gold paper lanterns. They were served real meat for the first time in weeks, and Wace gave a long, impassioned speech about the wars in Syria and Afghanistan, and lambasted the campaign speeches of presidential candidate Donald Trump. The American visitors, Robin noticed, nodded vehemently as Wace painted a vivid picture of the fascist terror that would be unleashed should Trump win the election.

Once Wace had described the horrors of the materialist world, he moved on to describe the UHC’s continuing success, and explain how the church alone could turn back the forces of evil now rallying across the planet. He praised the American visitors for their fundraising efforts and described the imminent creation of a new UHC centre in New York, then summoned various individuals onto the stage to praise them for their individual efforts. Evidently Mazu had been keeping Wace informed about happenings at Chapman Farm, because Amandeep was one of those called to the stage. He sobbed and shook his head as he approached Wace, who embraced him before announcing that Amandeep had now equalled the record for funds raised in a single day for the church. The five Americans who’d just arrived stood up to applaud and whoop, their fists pumping in the air.

When Wace’s speech ended, music broke out, just as it had at the end of the last feast, and people began to dance. Robin got up, too: she was determined to show willing whenever possible, and hoped to find a way, in the crush, to speak to either Will or Emily. However, this proved impossible. She found herself instead dancing opposite Kyle, who’d once been a high-level recruit, but whose inability or refusal to have sex with Vivienne had seen him relegated to one of the lowliest farm workers. Blank-faced, he moved jerkily in front of Robin, never meeting her gaze, and she wondered where he was imagining himself, until she noticed that his mouth was constantly, silently moving in a chant unrelated to the music.

69

In dealing with persons as intractable and as difficult to influence as a pig or a fish… one must first rid oneself of all prejudice and, so to speak, let the psyche of the other person act…

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Breakfast at Chapman Farm was usually the quietest meal of the day, given that it happened at half past five in morning. During Jonathan Wace’s previous stay at the farm his appearances at communal meals had been limited to two dinners, so when Wace and Mazu entered the hall at six o’clock the morning following his arrival, Robin gathered from the looks of surprise from all around her that this was highly unusual. There was an outbreak of uncertain applause: heads turned, and total silence fell as Wace clambered back onto the stage, already wearing his microphone. Mazu stood behind him, unsmiling, her face shadowed by her long wings of black hair.

‘My friends,’ said Wace, with a sad smile, ‘my beloved wife has suffered a loss. Some of you may have noticed, she wears a special pendant – a mother-of-pearl fish. It once belonged to Daiyu, the Drowned Prophet. The fish was found in Daiyu’s bed on the morning of her ascension.’

A little gasp ran through the hall.

‘My wife realised two days ago that the cord had broken and the fish is lost. She’s looked, but hasn’t found it. You understand, I’m sure, that I’m not asking you to search for a meaningless, materialist token. This is an artefact of the church. We – Mazu and I – will be deeply grateful to whoever manages to retrieve this precious item. I’m asking you all to set aside your usual tasks and help us find it.’

Robin scented opportunity. Only once before, on the night little Bo had gone missing from the children’s dormitory, had the rigid group structure at the farm dissolved. If everyone was going their separate ways, spreading out over the church grounds, she might be able to accomplish something. Taking a quick survey of the hall, she spotted Becca approaching the table where Emily was sitting and issuing instructions. Robin was certain the group had been told to stick together during the search.

Will Edensor, by contrast, was already leaving the hall, alone. Grabbing her porridge bowl, Robin hastened to put it on one of the trolleys before following.

It was warm, but a light summer drizzle was falling. Will was heading for the courtyard, his head bowed as he scanned the ground. Pretending to look for the lost pendant herself, Robin proceeded slowly past the barns and laundry, keeping a covert eye on Will, who soon reached the courtyard and started searching it. Robin was peering around the base of the Healer Prophet’s tomb, the rain sliding down the back of her neck, when a loud voice said:

‘Oi’ve already looked thar.’

‘Hi Shawna,’ said Robin, her heart sinking.

‘Will!’ called Shawna, whose pregnancy was now becoming evident, ‘Oi’ve looked thar, too!’

Will gave no answer, but turned and traipsed off in the direction of the farmhouse. To Robin’s disappointment, two other men joined him, and Robin guessed by their gestures they were suggesting a systematic joint search of the garden behind it.

‘I heard someone saying it might have fallen off in the children’s classroom,’ Robin lied to Shawna, determined to throw the girl off if she could. ‘Apparently Mazu was in there a couple of days ago.’

‘Come on, then,’ said Shawna.

‘I can’t,’ said Robin regretfully. ‘They told me to do the kitchen after the courtyard, but I can’t see why it would be there. I bet whoever finds it’s going to be a bit of a hero.’

‘Ah,’ said Shawna. ‘They will. Oi’m gonna do the clarsrooms.’

She bustled off. Immediately Shawna was out of sight, Robin headed, not for the laundry but for the passage between the men’s and women’s dormitories, eyes on the ground, still pretending to be looking for the fallen fish. She knew she’d be taking a risk in crossing the field by daylight to enter the woods, but as Emily and Will were currently beyond reach, she was determined to fulfil one of her objectives.

Robin kept to the edge of the field rather than taking a straight line across it, glancing back frequently and wishing she could be wearing any other colour than white, which would stand out against the hedgerow should anyone look over the gate. At last she reached the sanctuary of the trees and began her search for any trunk that seemed old enough to contain the hollow and hatchet described by Niamh Doherty.

It was strange to be in the woods by daylight, and even stranger not to be taking her usual route to the plastic rock. The woods were overgrown, untended and perhaps even dangerous for the children who played there, given the number of fallen boughs. Ducking under hanging branches, lifting her feet high over roots and nettles, feeling around trunks to check for hollows, Robin knew she’d be exceptionally lucky to find the right tree in the time she could remain there safely.

The light rain pitter-pattered on the leaves as Robin moved past a thick oak whose trunk was disappointingly solid. She soon found herself on the edge of the small clearing she’d entered once before by night, where a circle of thick posts had been driven into the ground. These had mostly rotted away to stumps, though a couple showed evidence of having been hacked at with an axe.

Robin stepped carefully into the ring, once again noting its ritualistic appearance. The ground underfoot was uneven and slippery with rotting leaves. Somebody had definitely cut down the posts, and now Robin asked herself whether this was the reason a hatchet had been taken to the woods: to try and destroy the ring. Possibly the axe had then been hidden because of the difficulty of smuggling it back up to the main farm? Better, surely, to let suspicion of theft hang over everyone, than be caught with it?

She bent down to examine something black she thought might be a lump of coal, but it wasn’t; after a few seconds, Robin decided it was a knot of charred rope. Instead of picking it up, she took a tiny pebble from the ground, which would serve as today’s marker, and was just slipping it into her bra when the unmistakeable crack of a twig breaking under a human foot made her whirl round. Jiang was standing between two trees on the edge of the clearing.

‘Jiang,’ said Robin, forcing herself to laugh, though sweat had broken out on her neck and chest, ‘you really made me jump.’

‘What’re you doing?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Looking for Mazu’s pendant,’ said Robin. At least she’d been found bending over, staring at the ground.

‘Why would it be in here?’ said Jiang. His right eye had begun to flicker. He rubbed it to disguise the tic.

‘I just had a funny feeling it might be,’ said Robin, her voice high and unnatural in her own ears, ‘so I thought I’d check.’

‘You playing at being Daiyu?’ said Jiang with a sneer, and Robin remembered that one of the Drowned Prophet’s supposed gifts was that she could find lost objects, no matter how far away they were.

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘No, I don’t know why, but I just felt this pull to the woods. I thought maybe one of the children could have picked up the fish and brought it in here, then dropped it.’

The story sounded extremely thin, even to Robin.

‘This place is odd, isn’t it?’ she added, gesturing at the stumps of posts in their circle. ‘What d’you think this ring was for? It looks like a miniature Stonehenge.’

‘Like what?’ said Jiang irritably.

‘It’s a prehistoric monument,’ said Robin. ‘In Wiltshire.’

‘I know what you’re up to,’ said Jiang, advancing on her.

‘What?’ said Robin.

‘You were gonna meet Emily here.’

‘Wh—no, I wasn’t. Why would—?’

‘Friends, aren’t you?’

‘I barely know her.’

‘When we were up on the vegetable patch, you came interfering—’

‘I know. I thought you were going to hit her, with the hoe.’

Jiang advanced a few steps, dragging his feet through the overgrown weeds. The dense canopy overhead made dappled shadows move across his face. His eye was winking frantically. He raised his hand to hide it again.

‘Emily sneaks off, to fuck,’ he said.

It was the first time Robin had heard sex described as anything other than spirit bonding in the church.

‘I… don’t know anything about that.’

‘Were you a lesbian, outside?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘So how come you knew where Emily was, in Norwich?’

‘I didn’t,’ said Robin. ‘I just checked all the bathrooms I could find, and she was in one of them.’

‘Were you doing it with her, in that bathroom?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘Why’s she looking at you so much since Norwich, then?’

‘I haven’t noticed her looking at me,’ lied Robin.

She couldn’t tell whether Jiang’s grubby accusation was made to shock and offend, or because he really believed it: he’d never given her the impression of much intelligence, although he’d certainly just proved himself to be surprisingly observant. As though he’d read her thoughts, Jiang said,

‘I see more than the rest of ’em with my eyes shut.’

‘Can I ask you something?’ Robin said. She needed to placate him: he was potentially violent, and her interference on the vegetable patch, and her association with Emily, whose disappearance had caused him to be harangued by his brother on the way back from Norwich, had clearly left him with considerable animus towards her.

‘What?’

‘You’re obviously very high up in the church.’

She knew this wasn’t true; Jiang had no real position of authority, though he displayed a definite liking for exerting power within the limited scope he was given. He now lowered the hand concealing his flickering eye and said,

‘Yeah.’

‘Well,’ said Robin, ‘how come you seem to work harder than anyone else in…’ She deliberately let the words ‘your family’ hang in the air before finishing, ‘you know – in your position?’

‘I ain’t got no false self,’ said Jiang. ‘Don’t need any of that other crap.’

As she’d hoped, he seemed subtly flattered by her question, and she sensed a slight diminution of aggression.

‘I just noticed you kind of… live what we’re all supposed to do. You don’t just preach it.’

She was momentarily afraid she’d overdone it, but Jiang squared his shoulders, with the beginnings of a smirk on his grubby face.

‘That why you won’t fuck Taio? ’Cause he don’t live it?’

‘I didn’t mean Taio doesn’t—’

‘’Cause you’re right,’ said Jiang, aggressive again. ‘He’s full of fucking EM, him and that Becca. Both of ’em. I work harder than anyone.’

‘I know,’ said Robin. ‘I’ve seen it. You never stop. You’re out in all weathers, helping run the farm, and it’s not like you don’t know doctrine. What you told me about the kids, and materialist possession – you know, that day Will was fussing over that little blonde girl? – that really stuck with me. It actually opened my eyes to how weird and abusive the materialist parent-child thing is.’

‘That’s good,’ said Jiang. He gave the bottoms of his tracksuit an unnecessary tug upwards. His tic had subsided and he was almost smiling. ‘That’s good you remembered that.’

‘You’ve got a way of putting things really clearly. Don’t get me wrong,’ Robin added, careful to sound nervous, ‘Taio and Becca are good at it, too, but they…’

‘Taio wanted to fuck her,’ said Jiang, smirking, reverting to what seemed to be his favourite subject. ‘Did you know that?’

‘No,’ said Robin.

‘But then Papa J went with her, so Taio wasn’t allowed any more.’

‘Oh,’ said Robin, eyebrows raised, and she lied, ‘I thought I kind of sensed something between Becca and Taio…’

‘Got your eyes open too, then, haven’t you?’

Perhaps because he was so rarely praised or appreciated, Jiang now seemed almost friendly.

‘Know what I was always good at, better’n Taio when we were kids?’ he asked Robin.

‘No,’ said Robin, ‘what?’

‘There’s a game, with cards, and you’ve got to make pairs, and remember where the pictures are,’ said Jiang, with a pathetic pride. ‘I remember stuff,’ he said, tapping his temple with a filthy fingernail. ‘And I see stuff. More’n they do.’

‘I can tell,’ said Robin, her sole objective now to get out of the woods while Jiang was in this friendlier state of mind. ‘So… d’you think I should keep looking for the fish in here, or d’you think it’s pointless?’

Jiang looked pleased to be asked for his opinion.

‘Nobody’s gonna find it here,’ he said, surveying the many fallen leaves and branches, twisted roots and patches of nettles.

‘No, you’re right,’ said Robin. ‘This is my first time in the woods. I didn’t realise they were so overgrown.’

She took a step towards Jiang and to her immense relief, he simply turned to walk with her, back the way he’d come.

‘There’s a tree over there,’ said Jiang, pointing to an aged ash, visible through the younger growth, ‘with a hollow in it and there’s an axe hidden in it.’

‘Wow,’ said Robin, taking careful note of the tree’s position.

‘I found it in here, when I was a kid. Nobody else knows,’ said Jiang complacently.

‘Wonder what an axe is doing in a tree?’

‘Ha,’ said Jiang, smirking again, ‘’cause Daiyu hid it in there. But don’t go telling anyone that.’

‘Seriously?’ said Robin. ‘The Drowned Prophet hid it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jiang.

‘How d’you know?’

‘I just do,’ said Jiang, with precisely the kind of smugness Shawna always displayed when given the chance. ‘I know stuff. I told you. I keep my eyes open.’

They emerged from the woods and began to cross the field, Robin careful to pause every now and then and poke at bits of grass, pretending she was still searching for Mazu’s mother-of-pearl fish, but also trying to think of a way of leading the conversation back to Daiyu without raising Jiang’s suspicions. The rain had gone off; the grass sparkled, buttercups and clover shining enamel bright in the watery sunshine.

‘Wanna know something else?’ Jiang said, halfway back to the five-bar gate.

‘Yes,’ said Robin, with complete sincerity.

‘There’s somebody here, right now, who was here a long time ago. They’ve come back again – and I’m the only one who realises.’

He cast a sly sidelong look at Robin out of his dark, narrow eyes.

‘Really?’ said Robin. ‘Who is it?’

‘Ha. I’m not telling,’ said Jiang. ‘I’m just keeping an eye on them.’

‘Can’t you even tell me, male or female?’ said Robin.

‘Nosy, aren’t you?’ said Jiang, his grin widening. ‘Nah, that’s for me to know. Funny how Taio and Becca are so clever and they haven’t realised. I’m gonna go to Papa J, when I’ve finished my investigations,’ he added importantly.

They climbed over the five-bar gate, Robin now burning with curiosity.

The curtains of the nearest Retreat Room were closed, meaning it was in use. Robin anticipated a ribald comment from Jiang, but his good humour seemed to fade somewhat as they passed the cabin.

‘Know why I’m not allowed in them?’ he asked her, pointing a dirty thumb behind him.

‘No,’ said Robin. It was welcome news that Jiang wasn’t permitted to spirit bond; she’d been worried her flattery of him might be taken as a sexual overture.

‘Nobody’s told you?’ said Jiang, suspicious again. ‘Not Taio?’

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘Nobody’s said anything.’

‘It’s ’cause of Jacob,’ said Jiang sourly. ‘But that wasn’t my fault, it was Louise’s, Dr Zhou says so. It won’t happen again.’

‘How is Jacob?’ Robin asked, hoping once and for all to resolve this mystery.

‘I dunno, I never see him,’ said Jiang. ‘It wasn’t my bloody fault.’

The courtyard was still full of people, all of them combing the ground for some sign of Mazu’s fallen fish, and to Robin’s relief, her reappearance with Jiang occasioned neither look nor comment.

‘Need the loo,’ Robin told Jiang, smiling at him to prove she wasn’t trying to get away from him, which she had no intention of doing, because he was proving an unexpected source of interesting possible leads. ‘Then we can look more.’

‘Yeah, all right,’ said Jiang, pleased.

Once inside the dormitory, which was deserted, Robin hurried to her bed to deposit the latest pebble beneath the mattress, marking yet another day at Chapman Farm. On kneeling down, however, she saw that several of the tiny pebbles she’d already deposited there this week had been dislodged and lay scattered on the floor.

Disconcerted, she ran her hand beneath the mattress, finding only one pebble still in place. Then her fingers touched something small, flat, loose and smooth. She pulled it out and saw a pearly bright, intricately carved fish.

Robin hastily scooped all the dislodged pebbles up, thrust them all inside her bra, leapt to her feet and ran to the bathroom. Here she clambered up onto the sink, opened the high window, checked that the coast was clear, and threw the fish outside. It landed in a clump of tall grass.

Robin jumped back down onto the floor, wiped her footprints off the sink and turned on a tap, just in time: she heard a group of women enter the dormitory.

‘Hi,’ said Robin, emerging from the bathroom and hoping that she didn’t look too red in the face. Vivienne, who was among the women, ignored her, instead saying to the group,

‘Check everywhere, OK? Even under the mattresses.’

‘How could the pendant have got under a mattress?’ Robin asked Vivienne, her heart still thumping rapidly from the shock of her discovery.

‘I don’t know, it’s just what Becca wants,’ said Vivienne irritably.

‘Oh, right,’ said Robin.

‘Aren’t you going to help?’ said Vivienne, as Robin made to leave.

‘Sorry,’ said Robin, ‘Jiang wants me to help him.’

As she walked outside to rejoin Jiang, she noticed Becca talking to Dr Zhou on the other side of Drowned Prophet’s fountain.

‘Where should we look?’ Robin asked Jiang. She had no intention whatsoever of pursuing the fish into its clump of grass: let somebody else find it.

‘Craft rooms,’ suggested Jiang, who was clearly enjoying Robin looking to him for orders.

‘Great,’ said Robin.

As they walked away, Robin glanced back at Becca, and was unsurprised to find her eyes following them.

70

Thus the superior man pardons mistakes

And forgives misdeeds.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Strike was having an extremely trying day.

At shortly after ten, as he was following Toy Boy and the client’s mother into Selfridges, Shanker called. Hoping for confirmation that Littlejohn was working undercover for Patterson Inc, Strike answered quickly, placing a finger in his free ear to block out the sound of canned music and talkative shoppers.

‘Hi,’ said Strike, ‘what’ve you got?’

‘Reaney’s tried to top ’imself. Fort you’d wanna know.’

‘He’s what?’

‘Yeah,’ said Shanker. ‘Overdose. Me mate in Bedford jus’ called an’ told me.’

‘When was this?’

‘Few days back. Silly cunt. Bought up and nicked all the pills ’e could get ’is ’ands on and took the lot.’

‘Shit. He’s still alive, though?’

‘Just abaht. In ’ospital. Me mate said ’e was yellow an’ covered in puke when the screws found ’im.’

‘Anyone know why he did it?’

‘Yeah, ’e got a phone call from ’is wife, a week ago. After that ’e started buying up everyfing anyone could give ’im and dahned the lot.’

‘OK,’ said Strike. ‘Cheers for letting me know.’

‘No bovver. Lot of it goin’ abaht, in’t there?’

‘What? Oh,’ said Strike, realising Shanker was talking about Charlotte. ‘Yeah, I s’pose. Listen, can you give those boys of yours a kick up the arse? I need something on Littlejohn, fast.’

Strike hung up and set off in pursuit of Toy Boy and his companion, thinking of Reaney as he’d last seem him, shoving away those Polaroids of naked youths in pig masks, then standing up, pale and sweaty, after mention of the Drowned Prophet.

He spent the next four and a half hours trailing around Selfridges after his targets.

‘He’s got a couple of suits and a watch out of her so far,’ Strike informed Barclay at three o’clock, when the latter arrived to take over.

‘Starting tae think I’m in the wrong line o’ work,’ said Barclay. ‘I could use a Rolex.’

‘If you can look that woman straight in the eye and tell her she’s beautiful, you deserve one.’

Strike left the store and walked off along Oxford Street, craving a kebab. He was crossing the road when his mobile rang again, this time from an unfamiliar number.

‘Strike.’

‘It’s me,’ said a woman’s voice.

‘Who’s “me”?’ asked Strike irritably.

‘Bijou. Don’t be angry. I had to ask Ilsa for your number again. This is serious, please don’t hang up.’

‘What d’you want?’

‘I can’t say it on the phone. Can I meet you?’

As Strike hesitated, a youth on a skateboard cuffed him in passing, making Strike yearn to slap the inconsiderate little fucker into the gutter.

‘I’m in Oxford Street. I can give you twenty minutes in the Flying Horse if you hurry.’

‘Fine,’ she said, and hung up.

It took Strike a quarter of an hour to reach the pub and he found Bijou already there, sitting at the tall table at the back beneath the glass cupola, wrapped in a black coat and nursing what looked like water. Strike bought himself a pint he felt he’d more than earned, and joined her at the high table.

‘Go on,’ he said, omitting a greeting.

Bijou glanced around before saying in a low voice,

‘Somebody’s bugged Andrew’s office. He thinks it was you.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Strike, who felt he’d reached his full monthly capacity for unsought problems and obstacles. ‘It’ll be some bloody tabloid. Or his wife.’

‘I told him that,’ said Bijou, her bright blue eyes moist, ‘but he doesn’t believe me!’

‘Well, what d’you expect me to do about it?’

‘Talk to him,’ she whimpered. ‘Please.’

‘If he doesn’t believe you, why the hell would he believe me?’

‘Please, Cormoran! I’m – I’m pregnant!’

For a split second, he felt as though dry ice had slid down through his guts, and evidently his horror had shown on his face, because she said quickly,

‘Don’t worry, it’s not yours! I only just found out – it’s Andy’s, but—’

Bijou’s face crumpled and she buried her face in her beautifully manicured hands. Strike surmised that Andrew Honbold QC hadn’t evinced joy at the fact that an embryo of his own creation was currently nestling inside the cosmetically enhanced body of a mistress he now believed had had his office bugged.

‘Has Honbold had anyone new in his office lately? Taken meetings with anyone he hasn’t met before?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bijou, raising a tearstained face. ‘I think it’s bloody Matilda. Will you talk to him? Please?’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Strike, not because he felt any sympathy for Bijou, but because an idea had occurred to him that was as unpleasant as it was plausible. Bijou now reached a hand across the table, but Strike withdrew his own hand, unpleasantly reminded of Charlotte.

‘I was only going to thank you,’ she said, with the hint of a pout.

‘Don’t. I’m not promising to do anything.’

She slid off the bar stool and stood for a moment, looking at him, and even now, he sensed her wish for some sign that he still desired her, and he was again reminded of Charlotte.

‘Cormoran—’

‘I said I’ll think about it.’

She swept up her handbag and left.

Strike, who had paperwork waiting for him at the office, sipped his pint and tried to tell himself he didn’t want a burger and chips. There was a burning sensation behind his eyes, born of tiredness. His stomach growled. The myriad problems of the day seemed to buzz around him like mosquitos. Andrew Honbold, Bijou, Patterson: did he not have enough to worry about, without all these extraneous difficulties?

Caving in, he went to the bar to order food. Once back at the table beneath the cupola, Strike took out his phone and, in masochistic spirit, checked the Facebook account of Carrie Curtis Woods, who naturally hadn’t responded to his follower request, and Torment Town’s Pinterest page, on which no new comments had been posted since his own. Tired of the stalemate, he typed out another question for Torment Town, determined to force something out of whoever ran the account.

Did you ever know a woman called Deirdre Doherty?

He pressed send. If the drawing of the fair-haired woman in glasses floating in the dark pool was indeed supposed to be Deirdre, that, surely, would get a reaction.

He next looked up the phone number of Reaney’s wife’s nail salon, Kuti-cles. After asking for Ava there was a wait of a few seconds, then he heard her approaching the phone while talking loudly to someone in the background.

‘—keep ’em in there and don’t touch ’em. Hello?’

‘Hi, Mrs Reaney, it’s Cormoran Strike again. The private detective.’

‘Oh,’ said Ava, sounding displeased. ‘You.’

‘I’ve just heard some news about Jord—’

‘Yeah, I know he’s overdosed.’

‘I hear you called him a week before he did it. Was that about your divorce?’

‘I never called ’im. Why would I? ’E’s known abou’ the divorce for monfs.’

‘So you didn’t phone him a week ago?’

‘I ’aven’t called him in ages. I’ve changed my numbers to stop him pestering me. It’ll have been one of his girlfriends, pretending to be me to make sure ’e took the call. He’ll put his dick in anything, Jordan will. First ’e shags you, then ’e slaps you around. She’s welcome to ’im, whoever she is.’

‘Right,’ said Strike, thinking fast. ‘Seems an extreme reaction to the call, if it was just a girlfriend. Has he ever attempted suicide before?’

‘No, more’s the pity. Listen,’ she added, in a lower voice, ‘if you want the truth, I’d sooner ’e died. I won’t be looking over me shoulder for the rest of me life. Got it?’

‘Got it,’ said Strike. ‘Thanks for your time.’

He sat for another minute, thinking. Of course, the phone call from an unknown woman posing as Reaney’s wife might have had nothing whatsoever to do with Reaney’s suicide attempt; the connection might just be an assumption of Shanker’s mate’s.

His mobile rang again: the office number.

‘Hi Pat.’

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Will you be coming back to the office this afternoon?’

‘In a bit. I’m having a late lunch at the Flying Horse. Why?’

‘I wanted a word with you.’

‘What kind of word?’ said Strike, frowning as he rubbed his sore eyes.

‘Well,’ said Pat, ‘I don’t think you’re going to like it.’

‘What is it?’ said Strike, now on the verge of losing his temper.

‘I just need to tell you something.’

‘Can you tell me what it is now?’ said Strike, whose neck was rigid with tension.

‘I’d rather say it face to face.’

What on earth the office manager needed to communicate in person Strike couldn’t imagine. However, he had a dim idea that if he employed a human resources person they’d advise him to accede to the request, and possibly not swear at Pat.

‘Fine, come up to the pub, I’m waiting for a burger,’ he said.

‘All right. I’ll see you in five minutes.’

The office manager and Strike’s burger arrived at exactly the same time. Pat took the seat Bijou had just vacated and Strike’s unease increased, because the expression on Pat’s monkeyish face was frightened, and she was clutching her handbag tightly on her lap, as though in self-protection.

‘Want a drink?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Pat.

Much as he wanted his chips, Strike felt he ought to hear Pat out before eating.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

Pat swallowed.

‘I’m sixty-seven.’

‘You’re what?’

‘Sixty-seven. Years old,’ she added.

Strike merely looked at her.

‘I lied,’ croaked Pat. ‘On my CV.’

‘Yeah,’ said Strike. ‘You did.’

‘Well, I had to. Nobody wants anyone my age.’

Strike suspected he might know the reason Pat had suddenly come clean.

‘I’m fired, aren’t I?’ she said.

‘Oh Christ, don’t cry,’ said Strike, seeing her lip tremble: one bawling woman a day was enough. ‘Littlejohn knows this, I take it?’

‘How did you know that?’ gasped Pat.

‘Has he been blackmailing you?’

‘Not until just now,’ said Pat, retrieving a handkerchief from her handbag and pressing it against her eyes. ‘He told me he knew, right after he started with us. I couldn’t tell you without admitting how old I am, could I?

‘But I was in the loo just now and when I went in the office he was there, and he had the Edensor file and I think he was going to take photos of it, because he had his phone out. I said to him, “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” and he closed the file and said, “You didn’t see that, and I’ll forget you’re a pensioner, all right?”’

‘You don’t think he got pictures?’

‘No, I heard him pass the loo. He wouldn’t have had time.’

Strike picked up a couple of chips and ate them, while Pat watched him. When Strike didn’t speak, she repeated,

‘I’m fired, aren’t I?’

‘You should’ve told me.’

‘You wouldn’t have hired me if I’d told the truth,’ said Pat, tears now falling faster than she could wipe them away.

‘I’m not talking about then, I’m talking about now. Stop bloody crying, you’re not fired. Where’m I going to get another manager like you?’

‘Oh,’ said Pat, and, pressing the handkerchief to her face, she began to cry in earnest.

Strike got to his feet and went to the bar, buying a glass of port, which was Pat’s preferred drink, and returning to set it down in front of her.

‘Why the hell d’you want to keep working at sixty-seven?’

‘’Cause I like working,’ gulped Pat, frantically wiping her face. ‘I get bored, sitting at home.’

‘Me too,’ said Strike, who’d been making certain deductions while at the bar. ‘So how old’s your daughter?’

‘Just turned fifty,’ muttered Pat. ‘I had her young.’

‘That’s why you bit my head off when I asked?’

Pat nodded.

‘Is she on Facebook?’

‘Never off it,’ said Pat, reaching for her port with an unsteady hand.

‘Then—’

‘Yeah. I’ll ask Rhoda. She’ll like helping,’ said Pat, taking a shaky sip of port.

‘Where’s Littlejohn now?’

‘He left. I made sure he’d really gone before I called you. He got in a taxi at the end of the road. He wasn’t happy I caught him. He’s off for a week now,’ said Pat, blowing her nose. ‘They’re going to Greece on holiday.’

‘By the time I’ve finished with him he’ll wish he’d bloody stayed there.’

He started on his burger. When Pat had finished her drink, she said,

‘Better get back, I was halfway through next week’s rota… thanks, Cormoran.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Strike, through a mouthful of burger. Pat left.

Strike knew full well he was guilty of an inconsistency. He’d damned Littlejohn on the principle that where there was one lie, there were more, but he was confident that Pat’s lie hadn’t been born of a fundamental lack of honesty. Quite the reverse: she was often far too honest for his liking. In the early days of her employment he’d have jumped at the chance to fire her, but time had brought about a complete revolution in his feelings: now, he’d have been extremely loath to lose her. Nevertheless, he thought, as he reached absently for more chips, he might delay the pay rise he’d been planning to give her. Forgiveness was one thing, but it was a poor management strategy to reward employees for coming clean only when they were forced to do so.

For the next ten minutes, Strike was left alone to enjoy his burger. When at last he’d finished eating, he reached for his mobile and called Shanker back.

‘I want to trace the call Reaney got, before he overdosed. D’you know any bent screws up in Bedford?’

‘There’s always bent screws, Bunsen,’ said Shanker, cynical as ever.

‘Five hundred for you and five hundred for them, if they can give me any solid information about that call,’ said Strike recklessly, ‘particularly the number it was made from.’

71

Even in the midst of danger there come intervals of peace…

If we possess enough inner strength, we shall take advantage of these intervals…

The I Ching or Book of Changes

In spite of Robin’s gentle probing, Jiang had revealed nothing more about Daiyu or Jacob during their search for Mazu’s mother-of-pearl fish, nor had he told Robin which person had allegedly reappeared at Chapman Farm after a long absence. All she’d learned for certain was that Jiang’s inner life was dominated by two preoccupations: a sense of injury that his brother had gone so far in the church while he was relegated to the status of farmhand and chauffeur, and a prurient interest in the sex lives of other church members, which appeared to spring from the frustration he felt at his own exclusion from the Retreat Rooms. However, their meeting in the woods had definitely left Jiang feeling more kindly towards Robin than hitherto, and this was some comfort, because Robin felt she needed all the allies she could get.

She had no doubt that Becca had hidden Mazu’s fish beneath her mattress. Robin had seen Becca’s expression of confusion and anger when the fish was found in the long grass by a triumphant Walter, and her immediate, accusatory glance at Robin. Exactly what had provoked Becca to try and incriminate her, Robin didn’t know, but her best guess was that Becca, like Taio, suspected some kind of alliance had been forged between Emily and Robin in Norwich, and that she was consequently determined to see Robin disgraced, punished, or even moved on from Chapman Farm.

Becca was a formidable enemy to have made. Robin worried that it might not take much to break the silence of Lin, Jiang or Vivienne if Becca pressed them for any incriminating information they might have on Robin. Unauthorised trips to the woods, possession of a torch, the fact that she’d answered to her real name: Robin had enough respect for Becca’s intelligence to know it wouldn’t take her long to guess that ‘Rowena’ was an undercover investigator. While Robin had told Strike about the pendant in her last letter, she’d again omitted mention of Lin discovering her in the woods, and her foolish slip in front of Vivienne.

As if this wasn’t enough to fret about, Robin was also aware that for every day she failed to seek Taio out and offer him sex, her status at Chapman Farm was worsening. Taio glowered at her from afar as she moved round the farm, and she was starting to fear an outright demand for spirit bonding which, if refused, would certainly produce some kind of crisis. Yet hour to hour, day to day, Robin clung on, in the hope she might yet get more information out of Emily or Jiang, or find an opportunity to talk to Will Edensor.

Meanwhile, Noli Seymour, Dr Zhou and the rest of the church Principals had all descended on the farm. Robin understood from overheard conversations that the Manifestation of the Drowned Prophet, which was fast approaching, usually drew the entire council to the church’s birthplace. While Dr Zhou remained cloistered in his luxurious office and Giles Harmon continued to spend most of each day typing in his bedroom, visible to everyone who crossed the courtyard, Noli and a couple of the men donned white tracksuits like the ordinary members. While they didn’t lower themselves to sleeping in the dormitories, all three could be seen moving around the farm working at various tasks, each with an air of conscious virtue and often with an ineptitude that would have drawn fierce criticism down upon any other church member.

Robin, who was still existing in a strange limbo somewhere between high-level recruit and manual worker, was sent to help cook dinner one evening, after a long session on church doctrine led by Mazu. She entered the kitchen to see Will Edensor chopping a mound of onions. Having donned an apron, she headed to help him without waiting to be given orders.

‘Thanks,’ he muttered, when she joined him.

‘No problem,’ said Robin.

‘It always does this to me,’ said Will, mopping his watery, pink-rimmed eyes on his sleeve.

‘It’s easier if you freeze them first,’ said Robin.

‘Seriously?’

‘Yes, but it’s a bit late for us to try that now. I s’pose we’ll just have to work fast.’

Will smiled. For a brief moment he looked much younger than he usually did.

The noise in the kitchen was relentless, what with the clanging of the enormous pans, the hissing of the vector fan over the industrial ovens and the bubbling and spitting of the usual slop of tinned vegetables, cooking on multiple gas rings.

‘How long have you been in the church, Will?’ Robin asked.

‘Um… four years or something, now.’

‘So that’s how long I’ll have to be here, to know doctrine as well as you do?’

She’d thought the question would either flatter him or provoke him into a lecture, either of which would provide an opening to push him on his allegiance to the UHC.

‘You just have to study,’ he said dully.

Wondering whether he was being less opinionated because his eyes were bothering him, or for some deeper reason, she said,

‘So you’ve been here for four Manifestations of the Drowned Prophet?’

Will nodded, then said,

‘But I can’t talk about it. You’ve got to experience it, to really understand.’

‘I feel as though I got a kind of preview,’ said Robin, ‘during my Revelation session. Daiyu came to the temple. She made the stage tip up.’

‘Yeah, I heard about that,’ said Will.

‘I know I deserved it,’ said Robin, ‘so I suppose I should be glad it happened. It’s like you said to me on the vegetable patch, there’s no “in trouble”, is there? It’s all strengthening.’

For a moment or two Will was silent. Then he said,

‘Have you been in the library yet?’

‘I searched it for Mazu’s fish,’ said Robin. ‘I haven’t used it properly.’

Though beautifully appointed, with mahogany tables and brass reading lights, the library contained few books, and half of them had been written by Jonathan Wace. The rest of the stock comprised holy texts of all major religions. While Robin would have welcomed a quiet hour in the library, she doubted she’d be able to concentrate long on the Guru Granth Sahib or the Torah without falling asleep.

‘Have you read the Bible?’ asked Will.

‘Um… bits,’ said Robin cautiously.

‘I was reading it yesterday. John, chapter one, verse 4:1: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”’

Robin glanced at him. She might be mistaken, given his reddened, puffy eyes, but she thought he looked worried.

‘Oh Lord, I’m going to need help,’ said a loud female voice. Robin and Will looked round. Noli Seymour had just entered the kitchen wearing a pristine white tracksuit, and was making a comical expression, hands pressed against her face. ‘I’m an awful cook!’ she said, looking round. ‘Some of you experts are going to have to help me!’

If Noli had imagined a stampede to assist her, or that the kitchen workers would be charmed by her admission of helplessness, she’d miscalculated. Tired and sweaty, none of them smiled, although Sita handed her an apron. Robin had a presentiment about what was about to happen, and sure enough, one of the older women pointed Noli to the pile of onions Robin and Will were tackling, doubtless thinking that this was where she could do least harm. Noli was enough of an actress to fake enthusiasm.

‘Great… um… have you got gloves?’

‘No,’ said the woman, returning to the large vat containing a gallon of tinned tomatoes bubbling on the stove.

‘Hi, I’m Noli,’ said the actress to Will and Robin. ‘Have you got—? Oh, thanks,’ she said, as Robin passed her a knife. ‘So what are your names?’

They told her.

‘Rowena, wow, that’s so funny, I played Rowena in Ivanhoe at drama school,’ said Noli, looking sideways at the way Robin was slicing her onion, and trying to copy her. ‘It was kind of a challenge, actually. I much prefer playing characters with substance, you know? And Rowena’s basically just, you know, beautiful and kind and noble,’ Noli rolled her eyes, ‘and I’m like, “Um, wouldn’t it be easier to use a mannequin or something?” Oh, God, I hope you aren’t named after Lady Rowena!’ Noli added, with a peal of laughter. ‘Were your parents fans, or something?’

Before Robin could answer, Will, whose streaming eyes were still fixed on the onion he was chopping, muttered:

‘Materialist possession.’

‘What?’ said Noli.

‘“Parents”,’ said Will, still not looking at Noli.

‘Oh – yeah, right,’ said Noli. ‘You know what I mean, though.’

‘No, I wasn’t named after Lady Rowena,’ said Robin.

‘I just get typecast, you know?’ said Noli, who was doing her best to touch the onion she was chopping as little as possible, holding it steady with her fingertips. ‘I’m constantly saying to my agent, “Just once, can you get me a character with character?” I’ve been feeling that so much more since joining the church,’ she added earnestly.

The threesome chopped in silence for a little while until Will, after wiping his irritated eyes on the sleeve of his sweatshirt again, glanced at Noli and said,

‘Are you really going to make a film about the Drowned Prophet?’

The actress looked up at him, startled.

‘How on earth did you know about that?’

‘Are you?’ said Will, his reddened eyes fixed on his work again.

‘Well, not just about – nothing’s definite. I’ve been talking to Papa J about maybe doing a film about him. How on earth did you know that?’ she added, with another little laugh.

‘I was the one serving you your potatoes when you were talking about it to Papa J,’ said Will. ‘In the farmhouse.’

The kitchen workers in their immediate vicinity were now listening to the conversation. Some had deliberately slowed down in their tasks, so as to make less noise.

‘Oh, of course you were, yes,’ said Noli, but Robin could tell Noli had no memory of Will at all. ‘Well, it’s just something I think could be really interesting. We could make sure a big cut of the profits go to the UHC, obviously. I think it would be an incredible way to bring awareness of the church to a wider audience. Of course, he doesn’t think anyone would watch a movie about him,’ she said, with a giggle. ‘That’s the funny thing about him, he doesn’t realise what he is, does he? He’s so modest, it’s one of the things I really admire about him, it makes a really nice change from the people I meet in my business, I can tell you.’

‘Would you be Daiyu, in the film?’ said Will.

‘No, of course not, I’m too old,’ said Noli. ‘I’d quite like to play his first wife, because he’s told me a bit about her, and she sounds like a – well, she was no Lady Rowena, put it that way.’

‘D’you think it’s strange,’ said Will, still dicing onions, ‘that Papa J married twice and nobody in the church is supposed to marry?’

‘What?’ said Noli. Her knife slipped off the onion she was mangling.

‘Will!’

One of the older women had spoken, her tone a definite warning. The kitchen workers around the onion choppers seemed to have come back to life: there was a resumption of the usual clanging and clattering as they moved away.

‘Of course it’s not strange,’ said Noli. ‘His first marriage was before he even – anyway, it’s a Higher-Level Truth, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’ said Will, still looking at the onion he was chopping.

‘Papa J and Mama Mazu, you can’t – it’s not the same. They’re, like, our parents – all of our parents.’

‘Materialist possession,’ muttered Will again.

‘Oh, come—’

‘Have you read the Bhagavad Gita?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Noli, clearly lying.

‘Lord Krishna talks about people of demonic nature. “Self-conceited, stubborn, intoxicated by pride in wealth, they perform sacrifice in name only, with ostentation.”’

‘Ohmigod, there are so many people in acting like that,’ said Noli. ‘The last show I did—’

But her voice was drowned out by another. Somebody outside the kitchen was screaming.

72

Nine in the third place…

The woman carries a child but does not bring it forth.

Misfortune.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

The kitchen door banged open to reveal Penny, whose once-green hair was now straggly and brown, and the front of whose sweatshirt was stained with what looked like blood.

‘It’s Lin,’ she wailed. ‘In the women’s bathroom. She’s – oh my God—’

Robin and Will were the first to move. Robin followed the younger man at a sprint, her apron slightly impeding the motion of her knees, and behind her she could hear some of the older women also running. They dashed down the pathway into the courtyard, but at the dormitory door, Will checked. Men weren’t supposed to enter the women’s dormitory. Robin pushed him aside, ran through the empty dormitory and through the bathroom door.

‘Oh Jesus,’ she said aloud.

There was a puddle of blood seeping from under one of the toilet cubicle doors. She could see Lin’s bloodstained legs, which weren’t moving.

‘Lin,’ Robin yelled, pounding on the locked door, but there was no answer. Robin dashed into the neighbouring cubicle, jumped up onto the toilet seat, seized hold of the top of the partition and pulled herself over it.

‘Shit,’ said Robin, landing and slipping in the blood surrounding the teenager, who sat slumped against the toilet.

She’d expected suicide, but saw at once that the blood, of which there seemed a terrifying amount, seemed to be issuing from Lin’s vagina. Her tracksuit bottoms were sodden and she was wheezing, while her neck, face and hands were covered in an angry red rash.

‘Lin,’ said Robin, ‘what’s happened?’

‘Leave m-m-me,’ whispered Lin. ‘J-j-just leave m-m-me.’

Robin heard footsteps outside the cubicle and hastily unlocked the door to reveal the worried faces of Penny and assorted female kitchen workers.

‘I’ll get Dr Zhou,’ said Sita, who disappeared.

‘N-no,’ gasped Lin. ‘N-n-not Zhou, n-not Zhou…’

‘You need a doctor, Lin,’ said Robin. ‘You’ve got to see a doctor.’

‘N-n-not him… I d-d-don’t want him… I’m fine… it’s fine…’

Robin reached for Lin’s hand, which was hot, and held it.

‘It’s going to be OK,’ she said.

‘N-n-no it won’t,’ said Lin faintly, now gasping for breath. ‘N-n-not if she g-g-gets Zhou… p-p-please…’

Robin could hear men talking outside the dormitory and a few minutes later, loudest of all, she heard Dr Zhou.

‘Get out of the way!’ he shouted as he entered the bathroom, and the women surrounding the cubicle scattered. Robin remained exactly where she was, and felt Lin’s fingers tighten on hers as Zhou appeared in the open doorway.

‘What the bloody hell have you done to yourself?’ he shouted, looking down at Lin, and Robin read panic in his face.

‘Nothing… nothing…’ wheezed Lin.

‘I think,’ said Robin, feeling terribly guilty about betraying Lin, but afraid of the consequences if she didn’t speak, ‘she might have eaten some plants.’

‘What plants?’ shouted Zhou, his voice echoing off the tiled walls.

‘Lin, tell him,’ said Robin, ‘please tell him. Think of Qing,’ she whispered.

‘M-m-mug… wort,’ said Lin, now gasping for breath.

‘Get up,’ snarled Zhou.

‘Are you mad?’ said Robin, looking up at him. ‘She can’t stand!’

‘Get two of the men in here!’ Zhou bellowed at the women who’d retreated back into the dormitory.

‘What are you going to do?’ Robin demanded.

‘You, move!’ Zhou barked at Robin, who remained exactly where she was, still gripping Lin’s hand.

Now Will and Taio appeared at the cubicle door. Taio looked disgusted, Will, simply horrified.

‘Wrap a towel around her,’ said Zhou, ‘we don’t want mess everywhere. Then carry her to the farmhouse.’

‘N-n-no,’ said Lin, starting feebly to resist as Taio began to roughly bundle a bath towel around her.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Robin, batting Taio’s hand away.

Lin was hoisted to her feet, the towel wrapped around her, then carried away by Will and Taio.

‘Clean that mess up,’ were Zhou’s parting words to Robin, and as he left the bathroom, she heard him bark at somebody else, ‘You, go and help her.’

Robin’s tracksuit bottoms were soaked in the warm red liquid. She got slowly to her feet, her nostrils full of the ferrous smell of Lin’s blood, as Penny came creeping back into the bathroom, her eyes wide.

‘What happened to her?’ she whispered.

‘I think she tried to give herself a miscarriage,’ said Robin, who felt nauseated.

‘Oh,’ said Penny. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I just saw the blood under the door…’

The ramifications of what had just happened were hitting Robin. She wondered whether Lin was going to die, whether Zhou was competent to deal with the emergency. She also knew she’d reacted to the crisis as Robin Ellacott, not as Rowena Ellis, shouting at Zhou and ignoring his orders, pushing Taio away, siding with the girl who’d tried to abort her baby. Then there was her admission she knew Lin had eaten plants…

‘Dr Zhou told me to help you clean up,’ said Penny timidly.

‘It’s fine,’ said Robin, who very much wanted to be left alone. ‘I can do it.’

‘No,’ said Penny, who looked queasy but determined, ‘he told me to… you really yelled at him,’ she added nervously.

‘I was just shocked,’ said Robin.

‘I know… but he is the doctor.’

Robin said nothing, but went to get one of the stiff, rough towels the women used after showers, spread it over the blood and began to mop it up, all the while wondering how on earth she going to explain that she knew Lin had had those plants, without admitting she’d been in the woods where they grew, at night.

Imitating Robin, Penny too fetched a towel to soak up the blood. When most of it was mopped up, Robin dropped the stained towel into the laundry basket, went to get a fresh one and ran it under the cold water tap. As she did so, she glanced up at the high windows over the sinks again. Her heart hammered almost painfully as she imagined leaving immediately. She’d just heard the first indication that Will Edensor might be having doubts about the church, but she had no idea how to talk her way out of the trouble she’d now surely landed herself in. If only she could get rid of Penny, she might be able to climb out of one of those windows and drop down on the other side of the building, out of sight of the courtyard; then she could run for the woods while the higher-ups were distracted by Lin, raise the alarm and get an ambulance to the farm. That, surely, was the right thing to do. Her time was up.

She returned to the mess on the floor with her wet towel and began wiping up the last traces of blood.

‘Go to dinner,’ she told Penny. ‘I’ll finish up here, it’s nearly done.’

‘OK,’ said Penny, getting to her feet. ‘I hope you don’t get in trouble.’

‘Thanks,’ said Robin.

She waited until Penny’s footsteps had died away, then got up, threw the wet towel into the laundry basket too, and had taken two strides towards the sink when a white figure appeared in the doorway.

‘Papa J wants to see you,’ said Louise Pirbright.

73

We find ourselves close to the commander of darkness…

The I Ching or Book of Changes

‘I haven’t finished,’ said Robin stupidly, pointing at the floor, which was still faintly pink.

‘I’ll send someone else to do it,’ said Louise. She was holding her hands in front of her, nervously interlocking her swollen-jointed fingers. ‘You’d better come.’

It took a moment for Robin to make her trembling legs behave. She followed Louise out of the bathroom and through the deserted dormitory. For a brief moment, she contemplated breaking away, sprinting down the passage between the dormitories and climbing over the five-bar gate, but she had no confidence that she’d make the woods without being caught: there were too many people in the courtyard, some of them grouped around Daiyu’s pool to make the usual obeisance, others heading for the dining hall.

Louise and Robin, too, paused at the pool. When Robin said, ‘The Drowned Prophet will bless all who worship her,’ she felt her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. Having daubed her forehead with water, she followed Louise towards the dragon-carved doors of the farmhouse.

Inside, they passed the scarlet-carpeted staircase, then stopped at a shiny black door on the left-hand side of the hall. Louise knocked.

‘Come,’ said Jonathan Wace’s voice.

Louise opened the door, indicated that Robin should walk inside and then closed the door behind her.

The room Robin entered was large and very beautiful. Unlike Mazu’s study, there was no clutter here. The walls were covered in peacock blue fabric, against which figures of ivory and silver, most of them Chinese, stood in graceful, modern shelving cabinets, in pools of carefully directed light. A fire burned beneath a modern surround of white marble. In front of this, on a black leather couch, sat Jonathan Wace, alone, eating off a low black lacquer table that was laden with various dishes.

‘Aha,’ said Wace, smiling as he set down his knife and fork and got to his feet. ‘Rowena.’

He was wearing an upmarket version of the white tracksuits nearly everyone at the farm wore, which appeared to be made of raw silk. On his feet he wore very expensive-looking leather slides. Robin felt the colour leave her face as he walked towards her.

Wace pulled her into a hug. Robin could still feel herself shaking, and knew he could feel it too, because he was holding her so tightly her breasts were squashed against his chest. He smelled of sandalwood cologne and held her far too long for her comfort. She tried to relax, but every muscle was tense. At last Wace loosened his grip, though still holding her in his arms, so he could look down at her, smiling.

‘You’re quite wonderful, aren’t you?’

Robin didn’t know whether he was being sarcastic. He looked sincere. At last, he released her.

‘Come,’ he said again, and returned to the sofa, beckoning her to a black leather chair that sat at right angles to the fire.

‘I’ve heard how you helped deliver Mazu’s baby, Rowena,’ said Wace. ‘Thank you, very sincerely, for your service.’

Momentarily confused, Robin realised he was talking about Wan’s daughter.

‘Oh,’ she said. Her mouth was still so dry it was hard to get out the words. ‘Yes.’

‘And tonight you offered poor little Lin solace,’ said Wace, still smiling as he added ragout to his plate. ‘You are forgiven,’ he added, ‘for speaking intemperately to Dr Zhou.’

‘I… oh good… I mean, thank you,’ said Robin.

She felt certain Wace was playing some kind of game. The smell of rich food, coming as it did immediately after the smell of blood, was making her stomach churn. Breathe, she told herself. Talk.

‘Is Lin going to be all right?’ she asked.

‘“The way of yang goes to and fro, up and down,”’ quoted Wace, still smiling. ‘She’s been foolish, as you’ve probably realised. Why didn’t you tell anyone she was consuming mugwort?’ he asked, apparently idly, as he picked up his knife and fork again.

‘I didn’t know,’ said Robin, as sweat broke out over her scalp again. ‘I guessed. I saw her with some plants a while ago.’

‘When was this?’

‘I can’t remember, I just saw her holding them one day. When I saw that rash she’s got tonight, I thought it looked like an allergy.’

‘There are no allergies,’ said Wace smoothly. ‘The rash was her flesh revolting at what her false self made her do.’

‘Will Dr Zhou be able to help her?’

‘Of course. He understands spirit work better than anyone now alive.’

‘Has he taken her to a hospital?’

‘He’s treating her now, and Taio’s about to remove her to a place of recuperation, so you needn’t distress yourself about Lin,’ said Wace. ‘I want to talk about you. I hear… conflicting reports.’

He smiled at her, chewing, then, widening his eyes, he swallowed and said,

‘But this is shocking of me… you’re missing dinner.’

He pressed a small bell sitting among the various dishes on the table. Moments later, bald Shawna appeared, beaming.

‘Shawna, another plate, glass, knife and fork for Rowena, please,’ said Wace.

‘Yes, Papa J,’ said Shawna importantly, bowing before leaving the room again.

‘Thank you,’ said Robin, trying to act the part of an innocent woman and church member, one who desperately wanted Jonathan Wace’s approval. ‘Sorry, but… what conflicting reports are there about me?’

‘Well,’ said Wace, ‘I’m told you’re a very hard worker. You never complain of tiredness. You show resourcefulness and courage – the labour was long, I hear, and you forwent sleep to help. You also found our Emily in Norwich when she was taken ill, didn’t you? And I believe you previously rushed to her defence when Jiang was giving her instructions. Then, tonight, you were the first to go to Lin’s aid. I think I’ll have to call you Artemis. You know who Artemis is?’

‘Um… the Greek goddess of hunting?’

‘Hunting,’ repeated Jonathan. ‘Interesting you speak of hunting, first.’

‘Only because I’ve seen statues of her with a bow and arrow,’ said Robin, who was pressing her hands between her knees to stop them shaking. ‘I don’t really know much else about her.’

The door opened and Shawna reappeared with everything Wace had asked for. She laid out a plate, knife, fork and glass in front of Robin, bowed again to Wace, beaming, and disappeared, closing the door behind her.

‘Eat,’ Wace ordered Robin, filling her water glass himself. ‘There are many contradictions in Artemis, as in so many human representations of the divine. She’s a huntress, but also protector of the hunted, of girls up to marriageable age, the goddess of childbirth and… strangely… of chastity.’

He glanced at her before turning his attention back to his food. Robin took a gulp of water, trying to ease the dryness of her mouth.

‘Personally,’ Wace continued, ‘I don’t disdain the teachings of those whom conventional religious people would see as pagans. I don’t believe the Christian conception of God is any more valid than the ancient Greeks’. All subjective attempts to draw a complete picture of the Blessed Divinity are necessarily partial and flawed.’

Except yours, thought Robin. She’d served herself ragout and polenta, and now took a mouthful. It was one of the best things she’d ever eaten, or perhaps it was simply that she’d been deprived of real food for so long.

‘And you’ve been generous to the church, Artemis,’ said Wace. ‘A thousand pounds! Thank you,’ he said, making his familiar expression of humility and gratitude, as he pressed one hand to his heart.

‘I should have made that sooner,’ said Robin.

‘Why d’you say that?’ Wace asked, eyebrows raised.

‘Because I know other people donated before me. I should have—’

‘There is no “should have”,’ said Wace. ‘All that counts is what is done. The journey to pure spirit is essentially a process of becoming ever more active. Prayer, meditation, study: these are actions. Regret is inactive and useful only in so far as it propels us onwards, to more action. So, all of this is very good, but,’ said Wace, his smile now fading, ‘your journal is… a little disappointing.’

Robin’s heart beat faster. When it came to her journal, she’d taken a line from what Niamh Doherty had told her: one thing enjoyed, one thing learned, every day.

‘No questions,’ said Wace. ‘No doubts. Certainly no indication of Rowena’s inner life.’

‘I was trying not to show egomotivity,’ said Robin.

Wace let out a bark of laughter that made her jump.

‘That’s exactly what I expected you to say, Artemis.’

Robin disliked the repetition of the new nickname. She knew it was meant both to flatter and destabilise her.

‘And I hear you’re the same way in doctrinal lectures. You never seek discussion or clarification. You’re studious, but silent. No curiosity.’

‘I thought—’

‘—that would show egomotivity? Not at all. It’s a maxim of mine that I’d rather face an honest sceptic than a hundred who believe they know God but are really in thrall to their own piety. But it interests me, this lack of curiosity and argument, because you’re not a submissive, are you? Not really. You’ve shown that repeatedly.’

As Robin struggled for an answer, she heard movement outside the room, a scuffling and then the sound of Lin’s voice.

‘I d-d-don’t want to g-g-go – no! N-n-n-no!’

‘Music,’ said Wace, setting down his knife and fork with a clatter, getting to his feet and moving calmly to a discreet panel on the wall. With the press of a button, classical music filled the room. Robin heard the front doors of the farmhouse slam. She had time to remember that Lin was almost certainly Wace’s own daughter before he moved back to the sofa and said, as though nothing had happened,

‘So I’m puzzled by you, Artemis. On the one hand, passivity, unquestioning obedience, an uncomplaining work ethic, a journal that asks no questions, a large donation to the church.

‘But on the other hand, a strong and dynamic individuality. Outside of doctrinal seminars, you challenge authority and resist deeper engagement with the church’s precepts. You demonstrate a strong materialist adherence to the importance of the body, over the requirements of the spirit. Why these contradictions, Artemis?’

Robin, who felt slightly stronger for the ingestion of food and water, said,

‘I’m trying to learn and change. I was argumentative before I joined the church. That’s why my fiancé broke up with me. I suppose… my false self is still there, still clinging on.’

‘A very nice, neat, pat answer,’ said Wace, smiling again.

‘I’m trying to be honest,’ said Robin. She wondered whether crying would help convince Wace of her sincerity. It wouldn’t take much for the tears to flow, after the shocks of the last hour.

‘I hear,’ said Wace, ‘the only time you seemed to show any interest in challenging church doctrine was with young Will, up at the vegetable patch.’

‘I wasn’t challenging him,’ said Robin, careful not to sound defensive. ‘I made a mistake and he corrected me. Several times, actually.’

‘Ah, well… Will’s better at memorising doctrine than living it,’ said Wace, smiling again. ‘He’s a clever young man, but hasn’t yet made pure spirit because he falters, constantly, at step six. You know what step six is?’

‘“The pure spirit knows acceptance is more important than understanding,”’ quoted Robin.

‘Very good,’ said Wace. ‘The materialist seeks understanding, where the pure spirit seeks truth. Where the materialist sees contradictions, the pure spirit grasps that disparate notions and ideas are all part of the whole, which only the Divinity can comprehend. Will cannot rid himself of adherence to a materialist conception of knowledge. He tries, he seems to succeed, but then he falls back again.’

Wace scanned Robin’s face, but she said nothing, certain that showing a particular interest in Will would be dangerous. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to speak, Wace went on,

‘And you challenged Jiang when he was instructing Emily, also on the vegetable patch.’

‘Yes,’ said Robin, ‘I reacted instinctively, I was—’

‘“Instinctively”,’ repeated Wace, ‘is an interesting choice of word, and a great favourite of materialists. Only when mankind has rid itself of the base emotions we call “instinct” are we likely to win our battle against evil. But your – to use your word – “instinct” seems to be particularly engaged by Disruptives, Artemis.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Robin.

‘Will. Emily. Even quiet little Lin has her Disruptive tendencies,’ said Wace.

‘I barely know any of them,’ said Robin.

Wace said nothing for a few moments. He cleaned his plate then dabbed at his mouth with a linen napkin before saying,

‘Your Revelation was difficult, I hear. Daiyu manifested.’

‘Yes,’ said Robin.

‘She does that,’ said Wace, ‘when she feels the church is under threat.’

He looked at Robin, no longer smiling, and she forced herself to look back at him, to school her features into a look of confusion rather than panic. His large, dark blue eyes were opaque.

‘You… can’t think I’m a threat to the church?’

The words came out as a whisper, which wasn’t feigned. Robin’s throat felt constricted.

‘Well, let’s see,’ said Wace, without smiling. ‘Stand up for me.’

Robin let her knife and fork fall to her plate and stood up.

‘Here,’ said Wace, moving away from the sofa to a patch of clear carpet in the middle of the room.

Now they faced each other. Robin didn’t know what was coming: sometimes Becca or Mazu led them in simple yoga movements as part of their meditations, and Wace stood as though about to give physical instructions.

After staring at her dispassionately for ten seconds, he reached out and placed his hands on her breasts, his eyes boring into hers. Robin stood stock still, feeling nothing but shock. She seemed to be watching from outside her own body, barely feeling Wace caressing her.

‘Spirit is all that matters,’ said Wace. ‘The body is immaterial. Do you agree?’

Robin said ‘yes’ automatically, or tried to do so, but no sound issued from her mouth.

Wace removed his right hand from her breast, placed it between her legs and began to rub.

At the exact moment Robin jumped backwards, the door behind her opened. She and Wace both turned, his hand falling from her breast. Becca and Mazu entered the room, the former in her white tracksuit, the latter wearing long white robes, a witch bride with her long black hair. With the door open, baby Yixin could be heard crying from upstairs.

It would have been hard to say which woman looked more furious and outraged. Neither Mazu nor Becca seemed to have learned the lesson of materialist possession: both, it was clear, were incensed to find Wace’s hands upon Robin. After a few frozen moments of silence, Becca said in a high, cold voice:

‘Giles has a query.’

‘Then send him in. You may go, Artemis,’ said Wace, entirely relaxed and now smiling again.

‘Thank you,’ said Robin.

She smelled Mazu’s particular odour of grime and incense as she passed the two furious women. Down the hall Robin hurried, the baby wailing overhead, her mind a hum of panic, her body burning where Wace had touched her, as though he’d branded her through her clothes.

Run, now.

But they’ll see me on the cameras.

Robin pushed through the dragon-carved doors. The sun was sinking bloodily in the sky. People were criss-crossing the courtyard, busy about their after-dinner tasks. Robin headed automatically for Daiyu’s pool, its dimpled surface glittering like rubies in the sunset, the constant patter of the fountain in her ears.

‘The Drowned Prophet will bless—’

But Robin couldn’t get the words out. Knowing she was going to vomit and not caring whether she drew curious eyes, she set off at a run towards the dormitory where she just made one of the toilets, where she threw up the small amount of ragout and polenta she’d swallowed with Jonathan Wace, then fell to her knees to dry-heave, her flesh clammy with revulsion.

74

Nine at the top means…

Perseverance brings the woman into danger.

The moon is nearly full.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

Two days passed, during which fear was with Robin constantly, to a degree she’d never felt before. There was no refuge, no place of safety: she knew an order must have gone out to keep her under close, constant watch, because one or other of the female church members was constantly at her side throughout her waking hours, even when she went to the bathroom. The only positive in her environment was that Taio, who’d taken Lin to some unknown location, still hadn’t returned to the farm.

It took more courage than ever before for Robin to leave her bed on Thursday night to write to Strike. She waited far longer than usual to set off, determined to make sure everyone was fast asleep, in no danger of dozing off herself because her adrenalin level was so high. Having slipped out of the dormitory, she sped across the field towards the woods, convinced that she’d hear a shout behind her at any moment.

When she reached the perimeter wall she found two letters in the rock. Murphy’s told her he was off to San Sebastian for two weeks, and while he’d written affectionately, she’d noted the undertone of displeasure that she wouldn’t be going with him. Strike’s note detailed the attempted suicide of Jordan Reaney.

After writing her two responses, Robin remained sitting on the cold ground, paralysed with indecision. Should she leave, now, while she had the chance? Clamber over the barbed wire and wait for whoever was going to collect her letters to pick her up? It was too late to get an ambulance for Lin, but the intensity of the surveillance she was currently under made her wonder whether she’d be able to achieve anything more if she stayed. She was losing hope that she’d ever be able to talk to Emily Pirbright again, given that both of them were constantly surrounded by other church members.

Yet there was Will, who’d shown definite signs of doubting the church during his conversation with Noli in the kitchen. Now she’d learned that this was no anomaly, that Will kept faltering at step six to pure spirit, she understood at last why a clever, educated young man with a large trust fund was being kept at Chapman Farm instead of being fast-tracked to conducting seminars and travelling the world with Jonathan Wace. If she could only engineer one last conversation with Will, it would be worth staying.

So Robin folded her letters and placed them in the plastic rock, ripped up Strike’s and Ryan’s notes and threw them into the road, spent another two minutes devouring the Double Decker the agency had left her, then set off back through the woods.

She’d only gone ten yards when she heard a car slow behind her and darted behind a tree. By the car’s interior light, she saw Barclay, and watched as he got out of his Mazda, climbed carefully over the barbed wire fence and extracted Robin’s messages from the plastic rock. Still hidden, peering through the branches, Robin considered calling out to him, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Separated from her colleague by only ten yards, she felt like a ghost who had no business conversing with the living. She watched Barclay climb back over the wall, get into the car and drive away, then turned slowly away, fighting the urge to weep.

She crossed the chilly field and finally regained her dormitory bed without detection. Partly because of the sugar in her system, but also because the panic engendered by her journey was so slow to subside, Robin remained awake for the rest of the night, and was almost relieved when the bell rang to wake everyone else up.

75

Thus the superior man controls his anger

And restrains his instincts.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

‘What d’ye think?’

Strike, who’d just finished reading Robin’s latest missive from Chapman Farm, looked up at Barclay, who’d brought the letter back from Norfolk twenty minutes previously and now stood in the doorway of the inner office, holding a mug of coffee Pat had made him.

‘It’s time for her to come out,’ said Strike. ‘We might have enough here for a police investigation, if they haven’t taken this Lin girl to hospital.’

‘Aye,’ said Barclay, ‘and that’s before ye get tae the sexual assault.’

Strike said nothing, dropping his eyes again to the last few lines of Robin’s letter.

and Wace groped me. He didn’t get far, because Mazu and Becca came in.

I know you’ll say I should come out, but I’ve got to find out whether Will could be persuaded to leave. I can’t come out now, I’m too close. One more week might do it.

Please, if you can, check and see whether Lin was admitted to the local hospital, I’m worried sick about her.

Robin x

‘Yeah, she definitely needs to come out,’ said Strike. ‘Next letter, I’ll tell her to wait by the rock and we’ll pick her up. Enough’s enough.’

He was worried, not only by what Robin termed Wace’s grope – what exactly did that mean? – but by the fact she’d witnessed something that was highly incriminating of the church. This, of course, was exactly what she’d gone to Chapman Farm to do, but Strike hadn’t anticipated Robin hanging around afterwards, a dangerous witness to serious wrongdoing. While he understood why she’d admitted seeing Lin with those plants, she’d seriously compromised herself by doing so, and ought to have got out immediately that had happened. There was a board on the wall behind him showing how many people had died or disappeared in the vicinity of Papa J.

‘What?’ he said, under the impression that Barclay had just spoken to him.

‘I said, what’re ye up tae this morning?’

‘Oh,’ said Strike. ‘Sacking Littlejohn.’

He brought up a photograph on his phone, then handed it to Barclay.

‘First thing he did when he got back from Greece was go and see Patterson. About bloody time I got something for all the money I’ve been shelling out.’

‘Great,’ said Barclay. ‘Can we replace him wi’ whoever took this picture?’

‘Not unless you want this office stripped of everything sellable by Tuesday.’

‘Where ye gonnae do it?’

‘Here. He’s on his way.’

‘Can I stay an’ watch? Might be my one and only chance tae hear his voice.’

‘Thought you were on Frank Two?’

‘I am, aye,’ sighed Barclay. ‘Which means I’ll be watchin’ him watchin’ Mayo for hours. If they’re gonnae make a move, I wish they’d fuckin’ hurry up.’

‘Keen to see our client kidnapped, are you?’

‘Ye know what I mean. This could go on for months.’

‘I’ve got a feeling it’s going to hot up pretty soon.’

Barclay left. Strike heard him pass Littlejohn in the doorway with pleasure: he was looking forward to this.

‘Morning,’ said Littlejohn, appearing in the doorway Barclay had just vacated, his short salt-and-pepper hair as neat as ever, his world-weary eyes fixed on Strike. ‘Can I get a coffee before—?’

‘No,’ said Strike. ‘Come in, sit down and close the door.’

Littlejohn blinked, but did as he was bid. Now looking wary, he crossed to Robin’s chair at the partners’ desk and sat down.

‘Care to explain that?’ asked Strike, pushing his phone across the desk, face up, displaying a photograph taken the previous day of Littlejohn and Patterson outside the latter’s office in Marylebone.

The silence that ensued lasted nearly two minutes. Strike, who was inwardly debating whether Littlejohn was about to say ‘I just bumped into him’ or ‘OK, fair cop,’ allowed the silence to spool through the room undisturbed. At last, the subcontractor made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a gasp. Then, which Strike hadn’t anticipated, he began to cry.

If Strike had been asked to rank everyone he’d witnessed crying recently according to how much sympathy he felt for their distress, he’d have given Bijou last place without hesitation. Now, however, he realised there was a category of weeper he despised even more than a woman who’d played a duplicitous game that had blown up in her face: a man who’d done his best to take down another person’s business, destroy that person’s reputation, undermine an investigation into men stalking a woman, and cause that woman additional fear and alarm, all of which he’d presumably done for money, but who now seemed to expect pity for being found out.

While tempted to give the man what Strike would have considered a proper reason for crying, he judged that there might be capital to be made out of what he supposed was Littlejohn’s attempt to show contrition. Strike therefore made no comment as Littlejohn sobbed, but waited to see what came next.

‘I’m in a lot of debt,’ Littlejohn finally blurted out. ‘I got myself in trouble. Online gambling. Blackjack. I’ve got a problem.’

I’ll show you fucking problems. You wait.

‘How’s that relevant?’

‘I’m up to my ears,’ sobbed Littlejohn. ‘The wife doesn’t know how bad it is. Mitch,’ said Littlejohn, brandishing the phone showing Patterson’s picture, ‘gave me a loan to get the worst people off my back. Interest-free.’

‘In exchange for which, you agreed to take me down.’

‘I never—’

‘You posted a snake through Tasha Mayo’s door. You tried to gain entry to this office when there shouldn’t have been anyone here, presumably to bug it. You were caught by Pat trying to take pictures of the Edensor—’

‘She’s lied to you, that Pat.’

‘If you’re about to tell me she’s sixty-seven, I already know. Big fucking deal.’

Littlejohn’s disappointment that this titbit was of no use was palpable, but Strike was pleased to learn that ratting other people out was Littlejohn’s preferred strategy for getting out of messes. Much could be done with such a man.

‘Why’s Patterson doing this?’ asked Strike.

‘He’s got a real fucking thing about you,’ said Littlejohn, trying to stem the stream of snot from his nose. ‘He’s an old mate of Roy Carver’s. He blames you for Carver getting forced out and it pisses him off you get all the publicity, and clients want you, not him. He says you’re taking all his business. He was really fucked off about Colin Edensor sacking us and coming here instead.’

Tears were still dripping from Littlejohn’s world-weary eyes.

‘I prefer working for you, though. I’d rather stay here. I could be useful to you.’

With immense difficulty, Strike refrained from asking what use he could possibly have for a treacherous, weak-willed man who had neither the morals to refuse to terrorise a woman who was already scared, nor the brains to stop himself being rumbled as a saboteur. Strike could only assume it was this mixture of delusion and wishful thinking that had led Littlejohn to lose a fortune at blackjack.

‘Well, if you want to be useful,’ said Strike, ‘you can start now. Give me my phone.’

He brought up the picture of the black-haired woman who’d been skulking on the corner of Denmark Street.

‘Who’s she?’

Littlejohn looked at the picture, swallowed, then said,

‘Yeah, she’s one of Mitch’s. I told him I thought you were having me watched. He put Farah on you as a back-up.’

‘What’s her full name?’ said Strike, opening his notebook.

‘Farah Navabi,’ muttered Littlejohn.

‘And what would you know about bugs in Andrew Honbold’s office?’

‘Nothing,’ said Littlejohn, too fast.

‘Listen,’ said Strike quietly, leaning forwards. ‘Honbold’s not going to let just anyone in there. His wife’s got him bang to rights already, she doesn’t need to bug him to take him to the cleaners. Somebody thought it was worth their while to put an illegal bug in Honbold’s office, and my name and Honbold’s have been in the press lately. So when I go and see Honbold and show him Patterson’s picture, your picture, Farah’s—’

‘It was Farah,’ muttered Littlejohn.

‘Thought it might be,’ said Strike, sitting back in his chair. ‘Well, I think we’re done here. You’ll understand why, under the circumstances, I won’t be asking Pat to give you the salary you’re owed.’

‘No, listen,’ said Littlejohn, in what looked like panic: evidently he could see his employment with Patterson Inc terminating soon as well. ‘I’ve got more stuff for you.’

‘Like what?’

Littlejohn pulled his own phone out of his pocket, tapped something into it, then shoved it across the desk. Strike found himself looking down at a photograph of Midge and Tasha Mayo laughing together outside Mayo’s Notting Hill house, both holding bags of Waitrose shopping.

‘Scroll right,’ said Littlejohn.

Strike did so and saw a picture of Midge leaving Mayo’s house by evening.

‘The second one was last night,’ said Littlejohn. ‘I was going to give it to Mitch.’

‘I’m sure there’s an innocent explanation,’ said Strike, who was sure of nothing of the sort. ‘If that’s your best shot—’

‘It’s not – I’ve got stuff on Patterson.’

‘I’ll get it myself if I want it.’

‘No, listen,’ said Littlejohn again, ‘I can get you something for that church case. Mitch has got a recording. He didn’t hand it over when Edensor sacked him.’

‘What recording would this be?’ asked the sceptical Strike.

‘Of that Kevin whatever he was called, who got out of the church – Kevin Purvis?’

‘Pirbright,’ said Strike.

‘Yeah, exactly. Mitch got an undercover recording of him.’

‘Why would Patterson covertly record Pirbright, when Pirbright had already told Colin Edensor everything he knew?’

‘They fell out, Pirbright and Edensor,’ said Littlejohn. ‘Didn’t they? Before Pirbright got shot? They weren’t talking to each other.’

Strike’s interest level rose slightly, because it was true Sir Colin and Kevin Pirbright had argued, then had little contact, in the interval between Kevin heckling Giles Harmon at his book reading, and Pirbright’s murder.

‘There was an email, I think it was an email, Pirbright sent to Edensor,’ Littlejohn went on, his expression pleading, ‘where Pirbright said he was piecing things together he’d repressed or something, right? Mitch was getting nowhere on the case, so he sent Farah to chat up Pirbright and see what new stuff she could get out of him. Pirbright wasn’t right mentally, see, so Mitch was worried if they interviewed him over the counter, Pirbright might blab on his blog. He was getting too mouthy.’

‘Why didn’t Patterson hand over this recording to Edensor?’

‘Because it’s shit quality. You can’t hear much. Farah fucked up, but she told Mitch afterwards Pirbright didn’t have anything useful to say anyway.’

‘And this is the valuable bit of evidence you think will persuade me to keep you in employment? A recording you can’t hear, of a conversation containing nothing useful?’

‘Yeah, but it’s you, isn’t it?’ said Littlejohn, desperate. ‘You can do something with it.’

If there was one thing that truly added insult to injury, in Strike’s opinion, it was attempts to flatter in the aftermath of proven treachery. Once again, it cost him some effort to suppress a straightforward ‘go fuck yourself’.

‘If it’s useless, why didn’t Patterson chuck it?’

‘He did – well, he chucked it in the safe and forgot about it. I saw it in there last time I opened it.’

‘All right,’ said Strike slowly, ‘bring me that recording and we can have another talk about your employment prospects.’

A very short fucking talk.

‘Thank you,’ said Littlejohn effusively. ‘Thank you, Cormoran, I can’t thank you enough. I really need this job, you don’t understand what it’s been like for me, the strain of everything, but as long as I’ve got regular work I can work something out, get a loan or something – you won’t regret this. I’m a loyal man,’ said Littlejohn shamelessly, ‘I don’t forget a good turn. You won’t have anyone more dedicated to this agency—’

‘You can save all that. You haven’t brought back the recording yet.’

Once Littlejohn was safely out of the office, Strike called Midge.

‘Wotcha,’ she said, answering after a couple of rings.

‘Want to tell me why you’re going shopping with our client?’

‘What?’ said Midge, startled.

‘You. Tasha Mayo. Waitrose,’ said Strike, barely keeping a lid on his temper.

‘I weren’t shopping with her,’ said Midge, sounding incredulous. ‘One of them split, that’s all.’

‘One of what split?’

‘One of her bags, what d’you think? I just helped her pick it all up.’

‘And how’s that keeping undercover, helping her pick up all her shopping?’

‘Fook’s sake, Strike,’ said Midge, now sounding annoyed, ‘what were I s’posed to do, stand there and watch her chasing tins all over the road? I’d’ve looked more suspicious if I hadn’t helped her. It’s what women do, help each other out.’

‘Why were you leaving her house last night?’

‘It weren’t bloody night, it was barely nine o’clock – and how d’you—?’

‘Answer the bloody question.’

‘She called me,’ said Midge, now sounding nettled. ‘She heard noises outside the back door. Her brother’s gone back up north and she’s jumpy being there alone, after you put the fear of God into her about the Franks.’

‘What was the noise?’

‘A cat knocked off a dustbin lid.’

‘How long were you inside her house?’

‘Dunno, ’bout an hour?’

‘The fuck were you doing in there for an hour?’

‘I told you, she’s jumpy! How d’you even—?’

‘You were photographed. Littlejohn’s just shown me the pictures.’

‘That fookin’ arsehole,’ gasped Midge.

‘What happened while you were inside the house?’

‘The fook are you insinuating?’ said Midge hotly.

‘I’m asking you a straightforward question.’

‘We had a coffee, all right?’

‘And how the bloody hell did you not notice Littlejohn was watching the house?’

‘He weren’t there. It must’ve been someone else.’

‘I’m taking you off the Mayo case,’ said Strike. ‘You can stick with Toy Boy going forwards.’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong!’ said Midge. ‘Ask Tasha!’

‘It’s what it’ll look like to the papers,’ said Strike.

‘Did you think of that when you shagged that lawyer with the fake tits?’

‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,’ said Strike, through clenched teeth. ‘I’ve told you how it’s going to be. Stay away from Mayo.’

He hung up, seething.

76

Here every step, forward or backward, leads into danger.

Escape is out of the question.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

The Manifestation of the Drowned Prophet was now imminent, and Robin was instructed to join the group decorating the outside of the temple with long white banners on which stylised, dark blue waves had been printed. This entailed climbing high ladders, and while struggling to affix one of the banners to just beneath the temple roof, Robin thought how easy it would be for somebody below to kick the ladder out from under her: a tragic accident, they’d doubtless call it. However, no such attempt on her life was made, and she returned safely to the ground, castigating herself for her paranoia.

‘Looks cool, doesn’t it?’ said one of the good-looking American youths Wace had brought back from LA, who’d also helped decorate the temple. The banners were fluttering in the breeze, so that the printed waves seemed to be falling down its sides.

‘Yes, it looks great,’ said Robin. ‘D’you know when the Manifestation is?’

She was dreading Daiyu’s reappearance in the temple almost as much as she feared the possibility of being summoned back into the farmhouse to see Jonathan Wace.

‘Week’s time,’ said the American. ‘Man, I can’t wait. I’ve heard so much about it. You guys are blessed, living here, where the church started.’

He looked down at Robin, smiling.

‘Hey, wanna spirit bond?’

‘She can’t.’

It was Shawna who’d spoken. She, too, had been helping decorate the temple, cheerily climbing ladders even though her pregnancy had now given her a definite bump.

‘Huh?’ said the American.

‘Spirit wife,’ said Shawna, smiling broadly before walking away to help Walter, who was struggling to collapse one of the ladders.

‘Oh, man, I didn’t realise,’ the American told Robin, looking scared.

‘It’s fine,’ said Robin, but the young man escaped swiftly from her presence, as though now frightened to be seen talking to her.

Robin was confused and alarmed by what Shawna had said. Surely women didn’t become spirit wives just because Jonathan Wace had sexually assaulted them? She assisted in the carrying of the ladders back to a barn, consumed by fresh fears.

Over the next few days, Robin sensed an undercurrent of gossip swirling around her. It was in the sidelong glances of the women and even some of the men, and especially in the antagonistic looks of Vivienne. Since Shawna had announced it outside the temple, the rumour that Robin was Papa J’s new spirit wife had evidently travelled widely.

As nobody, even the people making sure she went nowhere unaccompanied, had posed a direct question, Robin was in no position to contradict the report; indeed, she wasn’t entirely sure of the facts herself. Perhaps Wace’s mere laying-on of hands was sufficient to create a spirit wife? However, if, as Robin suspected, Shawna had leapt to a false conclusion, Robin was afraid she might be accused of starting the canard herself. In fact, she had a nasty feeling this unsought dilemma might be the thing to finally break her cover, that the little eruption of envy caused by Shawna would lead all who had suspicion of her to pool their knowledge. Robin found herself constantly fantasising about making a break for it and running for the woods, even though there was no doubt an aborted escape attempt would make her situation far worse. The sensible thing to do, she knew, was leave via the perimeter blind spot on Thursday night, when somebody from the agency would be in the vicinity to pick her up. As long as she left then, she’d miss the Manifestation of the Drowned Prophet, which she’d now learned would take place on Friday evening. It was an experience Robin was perfectly happy to forgo, after what had happened during her Revelation session.

Taio had returned to the farm, without Lin. Robin, who’d seen him only from a distance, studiously avoided eye contact. All her efforts now were concentrated on securing a one-to-one conversation with Will Edensor. Finding out how deep his doubts about the church ran would justify everything she’d been through, and she’d leave knowing she’d truly made an advance in the case.

On Tuesday afternoon, Robin was sent to work in the laundry, a utilitarian, concrete-floored building of brick, housing rows of industrial-sized washing machines and drying racks on pulleys, which could be hoisted up to the ceiling. The women who’d escorted Robin to the door left after seeing her inside, clearly feeling there were enough people loading and unloading clothes and sheets to keep an eye on her.

The steady chug and hum of the washing machines necessitated the raising of voices if the workers wanted to make themselves heard. Having received a sack of dirty clothing and instructions as to the correct machine settings, Robin rounded a corner into the second row of washing machines and with a jolt of excitement saw Will kneeling in front of one of them, dragging a mound of wet clothing into a basket. Beside him, entering settings on a second machine, was Marion Huxley, who’d been so obviously infatuated with Jonathan Wace when she’d arrived at the farm, and with whom Robin hadn’t interacted in weeks.

The punishing work regime and commensurate weight loss had had an extremely ageing effect on Marion, whose gaunt face now sagged as it certainly hadn’t when she’d boarded the minibus in London. Her dyed red hair had now grown out to show two inches of silver roots.

Neither Will nor Marion heard Robin’s approach, and only when she’d chosen the washing machine next to Will’s did he glance up at her.

‘Hi,’ said Robin.

‘Hi,’ mumbled Will.

Having unloaded the tangled mass of wet clothes, he picked up the heavy basket and walked away.

Robin began to load her own washing machine. The surrounding noise was such that only when a voice said loudly in her ear, ‘Oi!’ did she realise Marion had been trying to speak to her.

‘Hi,’ said Robin, smiling before she registered that Marion looked livid.

‘I don’t know how you’ve got the gall to be walking around, smirking!’

‘Sorry?’ said Robin, taken aback.

‘You should be! Lying about Papa J.’

‘I haven’t said a word about—’

‘You claimed he spirit bonded with you.’

‘No, I—’

‘And we all know you’re lying. You’re no spirit wife!’

‘I never said—’

‘And you know what?’ said Marion. ‘The Drowned Prophet will sort you out.’

‘I don’t know what you—’

‘She’s been seen, already,’ said Marion. ‘In the woods. She comes, around her Manifestation time. She comes to defend Papa J.’

Robin knew she was looking into the authentic face of fanaticism. Something rigid and alien lived beneath the skin of the human being facing her, something that couldn’t be argued with. Nevertheless, she heard herself say pleadingly ‘Marion’, without any idea of what she was going to tell the woman, but before she could find any words, Marion had spat in her face.

Robin felt the saliva hit her, just beneath her left eye, and something broke inside her, some last vestige of restraint. They’re all mad. They’re fucking mad. Robin pushed Marion roughly aside and strode away, to where Will Edensor was draping wet tracksuits and socks onto a drying rack.

‘Will,’ she said loudly, over the noise of the machines. ‘D’you want to spirit bond?’

‘What?’

‘Do you want to spirit bond?’ Robin repeated, enunciating clearly.

‘Oh,’ said Will. He looked as though she’d just offered him coffee: he showed little interest, but no embarrassment or surprise, and she wondered how many times he’d been to the Retreat Rooms in the last four years. ‘Yeah, OK.’

They walked together towards the door, Robin consumed with rage at Marion, at the church, at the hypocrisy and insanity. She couldn’t pretend any more. She was done with all of it.

‘Where—?’ said an older woman near the door, looking suspicious.

‘Spirit bonding,’ said Robin firmly.

‘Oh,’ said the woman. She looked confused and panicked, probably because she didn’t know what should take priority: Robin being kept under surveillance, or an act of submission and compliance that appeared to demonstrate true allegiance to the UHC. ‘I – all right…’

Robin and Will walked together down the path towards the courtyard in silence, Robin trying to formulate a plan of action. The warning ripples of anxiety barely registered in her rage and determination to force something useful out of Will in her final hours at the farm.

When they reached the Retreat Room, Robin pulled open the glass door and stood back to let Will walk inside first. She then jerked the curtain across the glass windows, so that the only light came from the single light bulb dangling from the ceiling.

In silence, Will sat down on the bed to remove his socks and trainers.

‘Will,’ said Robin, ‘there’s no need for that, I really just wanted to talk to you.’

He glanced up at her.

‘That’s not allowed. We spirit bond, or we leave.’

He stood up and peeled off his tracksuit top to reveal a pale, hairless torso, every rib visible in the harsh overhead light. As he turned to throw his clothes into a corner, Robin saw on his back the same strange marks she’d noted on the black girl who’d let Bo escape from the children’s dormitory, as though his spine had been rubbed raw.

‘What’s happened to you?’ she asked. ‘What are those marks on your back?’

‘I was in the box,’ muttered Will.

‘Why?’

Will ignored the question, instead pulling off his greying Y-fronts and tracksuit bottoms. Now he stood completely naked in front of her, his penis flaccid.

‘Will, I just wanted to—’

‘Get undressed,’ said Will, walking to the corner of the cabin, where the short length of hose pipe was attached to the tap. Picking the slimy soap off the floor, he began to wash his genitalia.

‘That thing you said to Noli, in the kitchen,’ said Robin, raising her voice over the splattering of water on the wooden floor, ‘it made me th—’

‘Forget that!’ said Will, looking over his shoulder at her. ‘That’s why I had to go in the box. I shouldn’t have said it. If you’re going to talk about that, I’m leaving,’

He towelled himself off with a mouldy-looking towel, sat back down on the grubby bed and began to masturbate in an effort to achieve an erection.

‘Will, stop,’ said Robin, looking away from him. ‘Please stop.’

He did so, but not because of Robin. Something that sounded like a lawnmower had roared into life just outside the cabin. Robin crossed to the gap in the curtains and saw Amandeep mowing out there, an expression of grim determination on his face.

‘Who is it?’ said Will, from behind her.

‘Amandeep,’ said Robin. ‘Mowing the grass.’

‘That’s because you’re on a Mark Three,’ said Will. ‘He’s making sure you stay in here. Get undressed.’ He’d recommenced masturbating. ‘Take your clothes off, we’re supposed to be done in twenty minutes.’

‘Please stop doing that,’ Robin implored him. ‘Please. I just wanted to talk to you.’

‘Get undressed,’ he repeated, his hand still working furiously.

‘Will, that thing you said—’

‘Forget what I said,’ he retorted angrily, still struggling to achieve an erection. ‘It was false self, I didn’t mean it!’

‘Why did you say it at all, then?’

‘I was… I don’t like Seymour, that’s all. She shouldn’t be a Principal. She’s a BP. She doesn’t understand doctrine.’

‘But what you said makes sense,’ said Robin, ‘there is a contradiction between—’

‘“Human knowledge is finite,”’ said Will, ‘“divine truth is infinite.” The Answer, chapter eleven.’

‘D’you believe everything the church says? All of it?’ asked Robin, forcing herself to turn and face him, his semi-erect penis in his hand.

‘“Persistent refusal to merge the self with the collective reveals ongoing egomotivity.” The Answer, chapter five.’

The motor of the lawnmower continued to roar right beside the glass doors.

‘For God’s sake,’ said Robin, trapped between Amandeep and the masturbating Will, ‘you’re really intelligent, why are you afraid of thinking, why d’you just keep quoting?’

‘“Materialist thought patterns are entrenched at a young age. Breaking those patterns requires, in the first instance, the focusing of the mind on essential truths through repetition and meditation.” The Answer, chap—’

‘So you’ve voluntarily brainwashed yourself?’

‘Get undressed!’

Will stood up, towering over her, his hand still working to maintain his erection. ‘It’s a sin to come in here for anything other than spirit bonding!’

‘If you force me to have sex with you,’ said Robin in a low voice, ‘it’ll be rape, and how will the UHC like being hit with a lawsuit?’

The lawnmower outside banged against the far wall of the cabin. Will’s hand stopped moving. He stood in front of her, painfully thin, still holding his penis.

‘Where have they taken Lin?’ Robin asked, determined to break through to him.

‘Somewhere safe,’ he said, before adding angrily, ‘but that’s nothing to do with you.’

‘So I’m to merge myself with the collective by not thinking, and having sex with anyone who wants it, but I’m not allowed to be worried about a fellow church member, is that what you’re saying?’

‘You need to shut up,’ said Will furiously, ‘because I know things about you. You were in the woods at night, with a torch.’

‘No, I wasn’t,’ said Robin automatically.

‘Yeah, you were. I didn’t say anything, to protect Lin, but it can’t hurt her now.’

‘Why did you want to protect Lin? That’s materialist possession, caring about one person more than everyone else. Is it because she’s the mother of your child? Because Qing belongs to everyone in the church, not just—’

‘Shut up,’ said Will, and he raised his hand threateningly. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘No quotations for any of that?’ asked Robin, still angrier than she was scared. ‘You haven’t told anyone I had a torch in all the days since Lin’s been gone. Why didn’t you report me?’

‘Because they’ll say I should have done it sooner!’

‘Or did you secretly like thinking someone was wandering around with a torch at night?’

‘Why would I?’

‘You could have refused to come with me to the Retreat R—’

‘No, I couldn’t, you’ve got to go when you’re asked—’

‘I think you’re having doubts about the church.’

Will’s eyes narrowed. He let go of his penis and backed away several steps.

‘Did my father send you here?’

‘Why would you think that?’

‘He’s done it before. He sent a man to spy on me.’

‘I’m not a spy.’

Will snatched his pants and tracksuit bottoms off the floor and began to pull them on. Certain he was going to walk out and immediately reveal the conversation, Robin, now planning to make a break for the woods the moment she left the cabin, said,

‘What if I told you your family sent me?’

Will was now jumping on the spot as he pulled up his tracksuit bottoms.

‘I’m going to Papa J, right now,’ he said furiously. ‘I’m going to tell him—’

‘Will, your family loves you—’

‘They hate me,’ he spat at her. ‘Especially my father.’

‘That isn’t true!’

Will bent to grab his sweatshirt, his face suffused with angry colour.

‘My moth—Sally loves me. He doesn’t. He writes me lies, trying to force me to abandon the church.’

‘What lies does he write you?’

‘He pretended Mu—Sally was ill. I didn’t care, particularly,’ Will added savagely, pulling his top back on. ‘She’s no more to me now than you are. I’m not her flesh object. Anyway, she always sticks up for my—for Colin. But M—Sally wasn’t ill. She’s fine.’

‘How do you know that?’ said Robin.

‘I just know.’

‘Will,’ said Robin, ‘your mother’s dead. She died in January.’

Will froze. Outside, the lawnmower whined as Amandeep cut the power. Evidently he was counting down their twenty minutes. After what felt like a very long pause, Will said quietly,

‘You’re lying.’

‘I really wish I was,’ whispered Robin, ‘but I’m n—’

A rush of wild movement, the thump of bare feet of wood: Robin flung up her arms too late, and Will’s punch hit her squarely on the side of her face and with a scream of pain and shock she fell sideways, hitting the wall before landing hard on the floor.

Through a haze of pain she heard the glass door slide open and the curtains being tugged back.

‘What happened?’ said Amandeep.

Will said something Robin didn’t catch through the ringing in her ears. Her panic was nothing compared to the sharp, pulsing pain in her jaw, which was such that she wondered if it was fractured.

Hands hoisted her roughly up onto the bed.

‘… tripped?’

‘Yeah, and hit her face on the wall. Didn’t you?’ Will barked at Robin.

‘Yes,’ she said, unable to tell whether she was speaking too loudly. Black spots were popping in front of her eyes.

‘Had you finished?’ asked Amandeep.

‘Yeah, of course. Why d’you think she’s dressed?’

‘Where were you both, before bonding?’

‘Laundry,’ said Will.

‘I’ll go back now,’ said Robin.

She got shakily to her feet, careful not to look at Will. She’d run for it the second she could: off to the five-bar gate and across the field to the perimeter.

‘I’ll take you both back to the laundry,’ said Amandeep.

Robin’s head was swimming with pain and panic. She massaged her jaw, which she could feel swelling rapidly.

‘We can go on our own,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Amandeep, taking a firm hold of Robin’s wrist. ‘You’ve both been judged to need more spiritual support.’

77

Six at the top…

Bound with cords and ropes,

Shut in between thorn-hedged prison walls…

Misfortune.

The I Ching or Book of Changes

After a further three hours in the laundry, during which nobody commented on her increasingly swollen face, Robin was escorted to temple for a meditation session led by Becca. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Will peel away from the rest of the group and march towards the farmhouse, omitting even to kneel at Daiyu’s fountain. Panic-stricken, Robin knelt obediently on the hard temple floor, her lips forming the words of the chant, her mind fixed solely on escape. Perhaps, she thought, she could slip away into some shadowy recess of the temple at the end of the session, lurk until the others had left, then make a break for the blind spot at the perimeter. She’d run across country, find a call box – anything but spend another night at Chapman Farm.

However, at the end of the chanting session, Becca, who’d been leading the meditation from the raised pentagonal stage that hid the baptismal pool, descended before Robin had any chance of implementing this risky plan and walked directly up to her, while everyone else filed out of the temple for the dining hall.

‘Have you had an accident, Rowena?’

‘Yes,’ said Robin. It hurt to talk; the pain from her jaw radiated up into her temple. ‘I slipped and fell.’

‘Where did that happen?’

‘In the Retreat Room.’

‘Who were you in the Retreat Room with?’ demanded Becca.

‘Will Edensor,’ said Robin.

‘Did Will suggest spirit bonding, or did you?’

‘I did,’ said Robin, because she knew laundry workers had witnessed her approaching Will.

‘I see,’ said Becca. Before she could ask anything else, a figure appeared silhouetted in the temple doorway and Robin, her heart rate now tripling, saw Jonathan Wace in his silk pyjamas. The subtle spotlights in the temple ceiling illuminated him as he walked towards them, smiling.

‘I thank you for your service, Becca,’ he said, pressing his hands together and bowing.

‘And I for yours,’ said Becca, now wearing a transported smile as she, too, bowed.

‘Good evening, Artemis the chaste… but what’s happened here?’ said Wace, placing a finger underneath Robin’s chin and tilting it to the light. ‘Have you had an accident?’

With no more idea whether he was playing a game with her than she’d had in the farmhouse, Robin said through clenched teeth,

‘Yes. I slipped over.’

‘In the Retreat Room,’ said Becca, whose smile had vanished at the words ‘Artemis the chaste’.

‘Really?’ said Wace, running his finger lightly over the bruised swelling. ‘Well, this represents a turning point, doesn’t it, Artemis? And who did you choose to bond with?’

‘Will Edensor,’ said Becca, before Robin could answer.

‘Goodness,’ said Wace quietly. ‘That’s an interesting choice, after what I told you about him during our last encounter.’

Robin wasn’t sure she could have spoken, even if she’d wanted to. Her mouth had become very dry again, and Wace was still tilting her face backwards, which was causing her pain.

‘Well, run along to dinner,’ said Wace, releasing her after another searching look. ‘I’ve got things to discuss with Becca.’

Robin forced herself to say, ‘Thank you.’

‘Thank you, Papa J,’ said Becca.

‘Thank you, Papa J,’ mumbled Robin.

She walked away as fast as she could. On reaching the temple steps she saw two of her usual escorts waiting for her, so was forced to walk with them to the dining hall.

Tonight, she told herself, you go tonight.

That, of course, was assuming she wasn’t about to be summoned back to the farmhouse to account for herself. Every second, as she ate her noodles, Robin expected a tap on the shoulder, but none came. Her now swollen and bruised face was attracting a few glances, but nobody asked what had happened to her, which was a relief, because talking hurt and she preferred to be left in peace.

When dinner ended, Robin walked with the rest of the women towards the dormitory. As they entered the courtyard, some of those ahead of her uttered exclamations of surprise.

Sixteen teenaged girls, all dressed in long white robes and holding flaming torches, were ascending the temple steps in the twilight. As the onlookers paused to watch, the girls positioned themselves in pairs on the eight stone steps leading to the temple doors, turned to face the courtyard, then stood in silence, their faces illuminated by the fire. Each girl’s eyes had been painted with dark shadow to mimic running make-up, which gave them a very eerie appearance.

‘Countdown to the Manifestation,’ Robin heard a woman behind her say.

‘How long do they stand there?’ said a voice Robin recognised as Penny’s.

‘Just tonight. It’s the boys’ turn tomorrow. Then the Principals.’

Robin walked into the dormitory, appalled. If church members would be keeping watch on the temple steps for the following three nights, she’d have no chance whatsoever of slipping out of the dormitory unseen. Grabbing her pyjamas, Robin headed for the bathroom, locked herself in the same cubicle where she’d found Lin bleeding, sat down on the toilet lid and fought the urge to break down and cry. The uncertainty of what was going to happen next was terrifying her.

The bathroom door outside her cubicle banged open and Robin heard the sounds of teeth-cleaning and running taps. Knowing the stall would be needed by somebody else, Robin got up, unlocked the door, went through to the dormitory and began changing into her pyjamas.

‘Oh my God, look!’

The cry came from the other side of the dormitory: a group of women had hurried to the window. Some were gasping, others clapping hands to their mouths.

‘What is it?’ said Marion Huxley, rushing to look. ‘Is it her?’

‘Yes – yes – look!’

Robin climbed up onto her bed, so she could see over their heads.

A small, luminous figure was standing motionless in the middle of the field Robin had so often crossed by night, wearing a limp white dress. She shone brightly for a few more seconds, then vanished.

The women at the window turned away, talking in frightened, awestruck whispers. Some looked scared, others enthralled. Marion Huxley headed back across the dormitory smiling, and on reaching her bed, threw Robin a look of malicious triumph.